Book Meme

From Holly:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 123.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
* Do not dig around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book on your shelf. Do not go to the other room to find an old textbook. Just pick up whatever is lying at hand.

Well, luckily the book that came to hand was The Scrapbook in American Life, edited by Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler. The sixth through tenth sentences for page 123 are as follows:

The idea of cross-generational bonding is reinforced by the possibility that girls who had worked on scrapbook houses when they were children in the 1880s and 1890s returned to the occupation when they were grown women after the turn of the century, giving the finished books to a new set of youngsters. Richards, who reminisced in Ladies' Home Journal in 1902 about the book house she had made as a child, wrote about making them for little girls. One example in the Strong Museum that, in light of the furnishings and clothing of the pasted-in figures, appears to date from the 1880s, has tucked-in paper dolls dressed in the style of about 1913. Conceivably, more than one generation of girls had played with it. The hypothesis that the book-house idea was resurrected for a second generation is supported by the long hiatus between the first magazine features on paper dollhouses around 1880, and the next group of articles, which appeared after 1900.

This book is a collection of scholarly articles about scrapbooks and what they can tell historians about the people who made them and the culture in which they were created. This particular essay is, "Scrapbook Houses for Paper Dolls: Creative Expression, Aesthetic Elaboration, and Bonding in the Female World" by Beverly Gordon.