North British Mercantile scrapbook, part 4

My grandmother, Gladys Corinne Walker, was born in 1897. During her childhood on a farm in Argyle, Michigan, she created scrapbooks in old repurposed catalogs. She must have been in her late teens when assembling this album, based on a 1914 seed packet and the WWI images that begin to appear. She moved to Seattle at age 18 and continued the scrapbook there. In this entry, I learned that she was a fan of silent film star Norma Talmadge.

I have managed to preserve five of the scrapbooks, even though two got water damaged around the edges in one of my leaky abodes. I think of this scrapbook as wabi sabi, damaged but still beautiful. (While the scrapbooks were stored in a wardrobe in an interior room of a huge old oceanside lodge, rain water leaked two floors down the interior wall into the wardrobe.) Let’s leaf through them page by page together, taking a closer look at especially interesting pictures.

There are many striking black and white drawings in this scrapbook. I’ll be sorting the photos by that and other themes after they are all posted.

I lost track of which page the above image comes from.

“Norma Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.” (Wikipedia)