by Allison Arieff, Sunset editor-at-large

Every year, my mother kept a datebook, usually one of those from the Museum of Modern Art featuring Impressionists or Frank Lloyd Wright. She wrote her appointments in it but more importantly, she kept all the ephemera of her daily life--business cards, postcards she'd received or just bought on her travels, photos, even movie tickets. At the end of the year the slim volume had plumped up, jam-packed with evidence of a year well-lived. I adopted this habit and was for years obsessed with similarly stuffing the beautiful Redstone Diary every year.  These volumes are like mini-histories; they're rich autobiographies I love to return to if only to recall for a minute a dinner I had or person I met long ago.

Jessica Helfand, a graphic designer and founding editor of one of my favorite websites Design Observer, is so taken with these collections of ephemera that she began to put together a book on what she sees as "valid repositories of social history." The beautiful result of her efforts is Scrapbooks: An American History, recently published by Yale University Press.

Some pages record the mundane (though they do so exquisitely) as with Mary Shultz's meticulous records from 1926 of all sort of domestic issues such as stain removal. Molly Kelley's 1929 record of summer camp reveals the mind of an anthropologist in the making:

Others are just plain fun to look at:

The examples in this book are so tactile, so full of texture and materiality that I am almost compelled to ditch the iCal for the blank page.