Picture sheets and scraps

The Victorian scrapbooks in the Early and Fine Printing Collection contain a mixture of greetings cards including Christmas, Valentines and New Years plus mementos such as a ticket to a fancy dress ball. Many also contain 'scraps' or small embossed cut out pictures to decorate the spaces in between the cards. The origins of these can be traced back to their use in German bakeries to decorate cakes but they were later employed in decorating Christmas and Valentine cards.

With the explosion in colour printing during the second half of the nineteenth century, a whole variety of scraps could be bought ranging from animals and flowers to humorous caricatures.