Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 January 1910 — THE PERENNIAL ALBUM. [ARTICLE]

THE PERENNIAL ALBUM.

la One Form or Aaotker It H*» Kxtatod for Moor Year*. "There are times,” tbe departing kuest remarked, pensively, to her husband, as she closed the guest book, "when I wish the economy o( the universe had been such that I might have been my own great-great-grandmoth-«r.** — : r—- : "Yon would have to go several ceSr turies back for that,” her husband replied, with the sympathetic comprehension of a fellow victim. "I ->aw in a collection the other day an autograph album middle ages. It wasn’t so very different from those that the girls passed round at school when I was a youngster. s "It was open to the drawing of a knight in armor, and It reminded me of Dick Barron’s donkeys—pen and Ink, done while you wait, with his autograph in the tail. They became so popular that Dick finally charged five cents an autograph, in self defense. He was the one boy in school who didn’t grit his teeth when he saw an album coming. He made enough out of them to buy a pair of white rats. Dick was always a lucky fellow. I’ve wondered since seeing the gentleman In armor If It was some Dick Barron of the middle ages who invented albums.” Whoever invented them, they seem to lead a flourishing. If protean, existence. The old albums of our greatgrandmothers, their delicately embossed covers enclosing pages of sentiment In exquisite hair-line penmanship, gave way to the smaller and far less formal albums of a generation ago—the kind that were passed from hand to hand In the cloak room, and were not sentimental. Mental photograph albums followed, with their harrowing questions as to one's favo/ite names and ideals. Guest books swiftly appeared In their train, making large demands upon the clever of finger or nimble of wit, and causing corresponding depression to those who, in a sentiment popular in their school days, "thought and thought and thought in vain, and thought at last they’d sign their name.” After such brain-racking experiences, the blind-pig album offered genuine solace; In the matter of drawing pigs with one’s eyes closed, the human race, it seemed, was pretty evenly gifted. The latest arrival Is the ghost album, in which one makes a "ghost” by writing his autograph—very heavy—and folding and blotting It, the result in the majority of cases resembling a cross between a centipede and a skeleton. This also has the advantage of being comparatively painless to both intellect (gad vanity. What Is the secret of the perennial existence of the autograph album? Curiosity? Imitation? Or Is it the genuine desire to keep a record of happy hours? If the latter, then there is hone that some one will yet Invent a form of record that shall be at the same time so artistic and individual as to he a joy to the possessor, and so alluring as to be a pleasure to the —possessed. If this seems a trifle difficult, a result that can be reached only by the slow process of evolution, after all, friendship is worthy even so great a sacrifice as submission to the demands of guest book and album. —Youth’s Companion.