Old Scrap Books
The making of scrap books or the filling of portfolios was not always an amusement for children, neither did older folk make those quaint scrap books with such assortments of literary and pictorial odds and ends solely for the amusement of their visitors. Many enthusiastic collectors stored their treasures in such books, the binding of which was often very costly and quite gorgeously ornamented. Some pointed with pride to collections of prints, others to albums of frontispieces, printers’ marks, and tailpieces, some of which were beautiful little pictures.
In modern times collectors rescue from the flames old tickets, pictorial benefit tickets, theatre passes, and quaint pictures which tell us of great events which happened in days gone by at Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and other places.
Ranelagh, where the entertainments of which relics in the shape of beautifully engraved tickets are to be found, was at Chelsea, and the gardens visited by Walpole, Johnson, and Goldsmith were famous for their promenades and for the music and singing which might be enjoyed, among the evening pleasures being displays of fireworks and masked dances. In the summer tea and coffee were sipped under the trees, and there were water carnivals on the river. There were also masquerade balls and dances, for which tickets engraved by Bartolozzi and other famous artists were issued. It is these tickets which are preserved and collected now.
The autograph hunter extends his hobby by adding old parchments and deeds with seals, for among the odd bundles of parchments in old libraries are many documents attested with thumb-marks and seals—“His mark,” of days when many of the landed proprietors could not write their own names.
The joys of St. Valentine’s Day, remembered by older people still, are unknown to the present generation, but collectors perpetuate February 14th as it was kept in the past by filling albums with such old valentines as they may be able to secure.