If you ask children today to tell you about sticker albums, they will probably tell you about football, a TV series or a cartoon. And, if they are lucky, they will tell you that they are missing this or that card to complete their precious album.
The tradition of the collector’s album dates back to the Renaissance, around the 17th or 18th century, and it is from this period that we can trace the origin of the scrap relief.
Early days of scrapbooking
It’s kind of obvious. The term scrapbooking comes from the words ‘scrap’ and ‘book’. If you are interested in crafting, you should probably be familiar with it: it is a technique widely used in DIY (do-it-yourself) projects to personalise and decorate photo albums, cards, notebooks, etc.
What you may not know is that there is evidence from the 15th century onwards that noble and educated Europeans used to carry something similar to a scrapbook. They were called “commonplace books” and were the way people organised their lives and collected the information they received from various sources. It was a very popular activity. In the 19th century, the automatic printing press was invented and suddenly printed books and texts became much more accessible. People began to collect business cards, postcards, prayer cards, advertising cards and newspaper cuttings. In their notebooks, they mixed annotations, hand-drawn sketches, watercolours and various bits of printed text.
Die-cut scrap relief from the Victorian era
A second major change in scrapbooking came with lithography, a very cheap technique for reproducing engravings, with which many artists began to reproduce and print their illustrations on a larger scale. From 1837, in the period of Queen Victoria, the printing of these illustrations was done in colour with chromolithography. Soon people began to collect and cut out these coloured drawings to decorate albums and diaries. They were also used in decoupage, glued onto boxes, screens, chairs or other surfaces, and then varnished many times. The final effect was as if the design had been painted.
Printers saw this boom and began to produce full sheets of illustrations in colour, varnished, embossed and ‘ready to use’. This meant that they were already pre-cut to the approximate shape of the image and only needed small strips of paper to hold them in place. People no longer had to cut out the images by hand, which had a knock-on effect on sales. From then on, this popular activity became known as scrap relief. Popular subjects included plants and animals, children, the circus, angels, religious figures, Christmas scenes and Valentine’s Day.
As well as England, Germany, Austria and France were countries where these illustrations were produced to a high standard. They were also used for promotional purposes by various companies, especially the biscuit and chocolate industry, as gifts to attract more customers.
Scrap reliefs in Spain
At the end of the 19th century, the fever of scrapbooking and scrap relief arrived in Spain, mainly in the form of biscuit boxes and chocolate bars. The Barcelona-based company Chocolates Amatller was one of the pioneers of advertising in Spain, with posters and scraps designed by famous artists such as Alphonse Mucha and Alexandre de Riquer.
Today, the scrap relief industry has been replaced by collectible sports cards and cartoon stickers and large albums. There are only a few companies left that still produce them in the Victorian style. One of them is the well-known Mamelok company, of Polish origin and with more than a century of history.
