Between the Covers

Softcover. Oblong small quarto. String-tied leather-textured paper wrappers with a photo mounted on the front wrap. A leaf or two detached, lacking three or four images, string appears to be an old replacement, near fine with mostly near fine photographs; a few have creases and two or three have chips in the corners where they were mounted too close to the inner margin.

Contains approximately 500 gelatin silver images, various sizes, averaging about 4¼" x 2¾", with a few dozen small "gem" images, and several others with margins artfully trimmed by the compiler. Mostly well-captioned in white album ink. Also laid in are a couple of printed pamphlets. Compiled between 1912 and 1914 by a female high school student from Roseburg, Oregon, the album follows her and her coterie of friends though an exciting year of socializing, parties, and vacation hijinks. Most of the locations are in Roseburg and the immediate vicinity, all of them are in Oregon. Other named locations include Portland, Grant's Pass, Coos Bay, Nye Beach, Albany, Yaquina Bay, Newport, the Jump-off Joe rock formation, Umpqua River, and others.

The relentlessly cheerful young women (occasionally accompanied by young men) are shown hiking, at the beach, eating watermelon, at picnics, crabbing, picking strawberries (and at Roseburg's 1914 Strawberry Festival), boating, with tennis racquets, at a "Thimble Party," at engagement showers, weddings, and mock wedding ceremonies, on steamboats and bridges, on horse-drawn wagons, drinking Lemon Coke, and in then-typical racist images on "Squaw Day" when they braided their hair. Not to be outdone, one image of the young men show them at a football rally with several in blackface.

While we are fairly immune to the charms of albums depicting "girls having fun," this is an excellent and carefully composed group of images, well-captioned, and in an unusually geographically specific area.

Item #438410