...there were scrapbooks. I started collecting cuttings when I was 16, for art references and articles of interest and I kept it up for about 20 years. So this is my pile of 38 scrapbooks, filled with newspaper and magazine clippings, postcards, flyers and all manner of ephemera wot-nots.
In the same way that I now have specific Pinterest boards, I tended to keep different albums for different subjects. Textiles was a favourite even back then.
Landscapes and atmosphere -
I often found poems in old newspapers and put appropriate ones on themed pages. The spread below, of various tapestry and decorative textiles, includes this lovely writing by Vita Sackville-West,
'Full Moon'
She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.
She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,
And all the big planets cared nothing for her,
That small impertinent charlatan;
But she climbed on a Kentish stile in the moonlight,
And laughed at the sky through the sticks of her fan.
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.
She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,
And all the big planets cared nothing for her,
That small impertinent charlatan;
But she climbed on a Kentish stile in the moonlight,
And laughed at the sky through the sticks of her fan.
Other books are just full of slightly odd, curious, often ugly and sometimes downright macabre images.
There are several life style 'aspiration' books, put together by a dirt poor teenager with nothing but dreams, some old magazines, scissors and glue.
And hundreds of references for colour, style, ideas and potential reference for the glowing art career I was (naturally) going to have.
I'm going to keep them out now that I've discovered them again. There is something satisfying about these old and battered albums; it's like looking into my own head from a few decades ago, when I dreamed big and didn't worry every day about the future. Some pages are like messages in bottles, from the me-then to the me-now. As if I somehow sensed something.
Don't Ask
Tell me love, what are you thinking of?
I was thinking how there are certain times of the night
when the dead wipe the frost from their souls and weep.
Of nothing simpler?
Of a courtyard I once visited and of a woman
standing beside a statue covered in snow.
Of no-one? No-one else?
She was so beautiful.
Had she been made of nettles I'd have wanted her.
Why think of her now, at this moment?
Because I am still missing the ashes of the dead and of dead obsessions
Why answer me like this?
Because I am bankrupt of small comforts, of small deceits.
Because we two are new, and without history,
And treasonous memory sleeps in so many beds.
BRIAN PATTEN
