Saving Scrapbooks From the Scrapheap

Eleanor Roosevelt in 1928 with Frank Landolfa, a craftsman at Val-Kill Industries, the subject of a show in Woodstock, N.Y.

Woody Guthrie saved paperwork documenting his peripatetic life, from utility bills for New York apartments to fliers protesting shanty demolitions in Seattle and lyrics for folk songs performed at a Los Angeles radio station. He and his family put some of the artifacts in scrapbooks, but that did not fend off damage over the years.

Robin Carson/The Woody Guthrie Archives

A scrapbook page with a letter from Woody Guthrie to his sister. Grants are helping preserve deteriorating scrapbooks.

The glues and album bindings weakened and failed. The page edges turned brittle and crumbled. Newspaper clippings yellowed and tore.

The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, which the family helps run at a tiny office in Mount Kisco, N.Y., has long had to keep researchers away from the more fragile scrapbooks. “Anytime anyone looked through, I knew we would lose a portion of it,” said Tiffany Colannino, the collection’s archivist.

During the last year the staff has finally been granting access to the albums, thanks to preservation work undertaken with a grant of $80,000 from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. Among other things, the money allowed the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., to box a half-dozen Guthrie scrapbooks in dove-gray cardboard and sheath the pages in clear polyester.

New labels on the covers explain the other treatments performed, with phrases like “nonaqueously alkalized” and “magnesium oxide particles in a perfluoro compound.”

Next year the albums may go on the road for celebrations of Guthrie’s centennial. “Now that everything’s conserved, it can be traveled and exhibited,” Ms. Colannino said. Digitized pages will be reproduced for new books, including one by the singer’s daughter Nora Guthrie for powerHouse Books about his years in New York.

Photos and clippings in the scrapbooks trace his wanderings in Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side and Coney Island, through three divorces and the births of five of his children, and his decline from Huntington’s disease at hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens.

The government has financed dozens of other scrapbook rescues in the past few years. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston has received $150,000 from the federal Save America’s Treasures program to help preserve about 100 of Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House albums.

She kept memorabilia from interior restorations, dinner parties and the redesign of the Rose Garden. Fabric swatches and dried flowers are tucked between pages.

The library staff has not yet fully examined the deteriorating albums. Until the Northeast Document Conservation Center can stabilize them, “We don’t want to handle them,” said Karen Adler Abramson, the library’s chief archivist.

Save America’s Treasures has given $170,000 to Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in Atlanta to conserve three dozen scrapbooks made by African-Americans. They commemorate the lives of freed slaves, sorority members and celebrities, including the author Alice Walker and the vaudeville star Flournoy Miller. The tightly packed mementos include military patches as well as pencils for signing girls’ dance cards.

When an item has fallen off and ended up shuffled around, members of the Emory staff study the glue stains on the back to see if any empty page in the book carries a matching ghostly outline. “It’s a map of where it went,” said Kim Norman, the library’s scrapbook conservator.

This year the government also financed conservation for a deteriorating 1930s album that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy helped design for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and ephemera scrapbooks related to the Ball family (of Ball jar fame) at Minnetrista, a museum in Muncie, Ind.

In the Balls’ arrays of photos, clippings and invitations, “anything that was supposed to be attached is becoming unattached,” said Karen M. Vincent, Minnetrista’s director of collections.

One major underlying problem for conservators is that the scrapbooks in most cases were store-bought and mass-produced, with vulnerable flexing spines and acidic papers.

“They weren’t fancy books,” said Mary Patrick Bogan, the Northeast Center’s director of book conservation. “They were made for people to add to.”

MRS. ROOSEVELT’S CRAFTS

Eleanor Roosevelt retreated from the chaos of politics and a difficult marriage to Val-Kill, a Dutch Colonial Revival cottage on the family estate in Hyde Park, N.Y. In the 1920s she converted its outbuildings into an idealistic factory called Val-Kill Industries.

She and a few female friends supervised workshops there for a dozen cabinetmakers, pewter smiths and weavers. The artisans also trained underemployed local farmers and their wives to earn extra money by producing handicrafts.

Mrs. Roosevelt displayed the wares at a family town house in New York. The designs derived from early Americana, including fluted candlesticks, rough wool blankets, and dressers and chairs with turned legs and bun feet. Val-Kill Industries also supplied a few modern necessities, like file cabinets, ashtrays and magazine racks.

The company never managed to train enough apprentices to alleviate poverty around Hyde Park, and Mrs. Roosevelt closed it in 1936. But the furniture did end up in prominent politicians’ homes, including the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually adapted the Val-Kill concept for his federal stimulus programs aimed at preserving regional arts-and-crafts traditions.

“It’s not a stretch to say that Val-Kill Industries informed the New Deal,” said Frank Futral, a curator at Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites in Hyde Park, part of the National Park Service. He has helped organize a show on view through Nov. 5 at the Woodstock School of Art, “A New Deal for Youth: Eleanor Roosevelt, Val-Kill Industries and the Woodstock Resident Work Center.”

In Woodstock, N.Y., a short drive across the Hudson River from Val-Kill, Mrs. Roosevelt encouraged the government to build a bluestone campus for apprentice woodworkers, ironsmiths and weavers. The 1930s buildings, now home to the Woodstock School of Art, retain their hammered iron hinges. The current exhibition features artifacts from the looms, forges and lathes of teachers and students at Val-Kill and Woodstock.

In Hyde Park Mrs. Roosevelt eventually turned the Val-Kill Industries complex into her fulltime home, furnished mainly with the factory’s products. When John F. Kennedy visited her on the campaign trail, “the table they were having their tea on was a Val-Kill table,” Mr. Futral said.

The family largely emptied the house after Mrs. Roosevelt’s death, and the Park Service has been recreating her décor. It has borrowed a few pieces of Val-Kill Industries furniture from Richard R. Cain, a Florida collector whose grandparents worked for Mrs. Roosevelt. (He maintains a Web site, val-kill.com, about his holdings.)

A half-dozen Val-Kill wares are on view through Oct. 30 at the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan in “The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis.” In a year or so, partly with loans from Mr. Cain, Mr. Futral said that he planned to create Val-Kill Industries room settings in a fieldstone cottage alongside the former factory.