In the realm of artists and poets, the scrapbook embraces new territory. Memories conflate, reposition themselves, diffuse and are recaptured, only to be brilliantly juxtaposed in some whimsical form on a subsequent page. Brian Coffey, a robust chronicler of the everyday, produced scrapbooks that he termed "Self-Books" — which were unedited and haphazard, with taped-over annotations and plenty of impulsive, hand-scrawled opinion. Notes Rebecca Johnson Melvin, curator of the Coffey collection at the University of Delaware, "The Self Books are unique to the Brian Coffey Papers. They are neither simply journals nor scrapbooks, but a combination of both ... which contain journal entries, correspondence, newspaper clippings, early drafts of poems, and notes for future works. The Self Books offer a rare glimpse into the mind of the poet. They are unselfconscious, intended for no one but the author and his family. They also reflect the spirit of the time in which they were created; Coffey frequently includes newspaper clippings detailing current events." The covers of Coffey's books, too, are striking because they capture the lack of pretense that resonate throughout the self-books themselves. (Special Collections, University of Delaware.)

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