Elatia Harris was living and painting in Italy when she started scrapbooking — eventually amassing 18 volumes, which span from the early 1970's through the mid-1980's. During that time she held onto paper ephemera with the zeal of a scrapbooking Edwardian, and recalls with sadness the many poster fragments that somehow escaped her. All these books were boxed up, though not forgotten, and recently hauled out for the first time in two decades. For the next week we will feature pages from Elatia's books.

To stiffen the covers of the composition books she used as travel diaries, and to create endpapers, the writer collaged soap wrappers, museum and train ticket stubs, maps, hotel stationery and scraps of outdated posters torn from Neapolitan and Roman walls onto the first few pages of each volume.

From the collection of Elatia Harris.

07.06.09     Comments (14)     digg | del.ic.io.us | reddit