Random Saturday - "Poesiealbum"

The other day I rummaged through my book cabinets. Where was it? I was so sure it had always been right there. Which cabinet or drawer or "safe spot" had I absent-mindedly chosen this time?
I'm talking about my "Poesiealbum", literally "poetry album".
I don't know if you have ever heard of this tradition which has been around for centuries, mostly in German and Dutch speaking regions of Europe.
Thank you to my friend (one of my sisters couldn't find her album, either, and my friend saved the other one having to look for hers) who was so kind to send me pictures of her album to illustrate this post. Of course I edited out the names and location.

The tradition started with the "Stammbuch" or "Album Amicorum" in the early 16th century in the circle of the Wittenberg reformers. Followers of Luther and his associates asked them for handwritten notes to remember their connection.

"Stammbücher" could be books, often theological ones, with added empty pages, but also loose leaves which could then be bound into a Bible.

In the beginning, this tradition was not restricted to academic circles, but to Protestant ones. When it was mainly taken over by the academic community with students collecting notes by fellow students, but also professors, it spread to other countries and also among Catholics.
For some time, it was also adopted by nobility where guest books had already been a custom.

Usually, those albums were used during times of study or travel and ended with the start of a profession. They were kept not only for sentimental reasons to remember friends from that period, but also for references that could be helpful.

While the tradition had mostly vanished in academic circles in the early 19th century, the middle class, which had started taking it over in the late 18th century, kept it alive. Now also women and children collected inscriptions by family and friends and the "Stammbuch" became the "Poesiealbum" which also meant the type of inscriptions changed and were frowned upon by "opinion leaders in matter of artistic taste" who found them too trivial.

They changed even more, however, especially after the "Poesiealbum" mostly became a thing in elementary schools.
The inscriptions could be anything from single poetry verses, quotes, advice, adminitions, religious or secular, but in my time many of the little poems - some of which turned up regularly with some classmates using the same one for everyone's album - were confirmations of everlasting friendship or they were humorous, sometimes both.

Here's an example for the first one :
I sincerely hope that you will not forget me so quickly, and I wish you something special, stay just the way you are!

I can't remember the first ones I wrote, but I got bored of the usual quotes or proverbs after a while, so instead I took poems by a German humorist, for example the one about why the lemons turned sour. From what I read, that's not something many children did.

You usually wrote on the right page and the left page got some kind of picture.
Very popular were "Glanzbilder", literally "glossy pictures" (in English "die cuts" or "scraps"), of kittens, puppies, birds, flower bouquets (sometimes in baskets), angels, even better (and more expensive) if they had glitter. You can still get these today, by the way. When we did a kind of "Poesiealbum" for a retiring colleague, I got some for the nostalgic feeling.

My godmother put a pressed flower in my album, safely covered with adhesive foil.
There were also a lot of drawings, though. Or a mix of glossy and hand drawn pictures. I used to do bad illustrations myself to go with the poems chosen by me, for example lemons with stick legs.

When I look at album pages others share, they all look so familiar to me.
We still had lessons for "Schönschrift" = "beautiful writing" in our early school years - I never got a 1, which was our best mark, no matter how hard I tried - and of course that was expected from us to apply in the albums as well.
Therefore, a lot of those pages could be right out of my own album, down to the embellishments, the dog-ears hiding "secret" little messages, the pencil lines to make sure all lines were straight (sometimes erased afterwards, sometimes not, sometimes badly) - and the typos!
Of course we wrote with fountain pens back then and every, now and then see letters erased with what was called "ink killer" for example (and which came back again after a certain time) or are crossed out.
If you had a "Poesiealbum", you had to live with all of that because you had absolutely no influence on what the others wrote, how beautifully they wrote or not or how messy it got.

I had almost forgotten about this kind of pencil "rubbings"!

My album is quite messy which isn't entirely the others' fault.
I had reserved a spot for my mother and one of the coveted glossy pictures. A classmate thought it was meant for use and glued it in. I ripped it back out which of course looked ugly, so I glued the pages together.

Those who have been following me for a while know about my difficult relationship with glue ... yes, it looked terrible and also I felt really guilty for hiding my classmate's inscription that way. Brigitte, I'm so sorry, I was only 6 and overcome by emotion when I did that.
By the way ... my mother never got around to actually write into my album although I had found a note with a draft once (I knew she didn't want to because she didn't like her own handwriting), so all of that had been for nothing.

I'm always amazed how beautiful and clean older albums look, stunning handwriting, sometimes with drawings, really pretty.

Picture via pxhere

Interesting is also that there are actually books like that in 19th century US America, probably introduced by German or Dutch immigrants.
They didn't catch on, though, and were replaced by the more popular yearbooks.

The "Poesiealbum" finally got a successor, the so-called "Freundschaftsbuch" or "Freundebuch" = "friendship book" or "friend book" which is funny because that's what the old Latin name means.
It doesn't take us back to those old times, though.
The "Freundschaftsbuch" looks like a lot like a collection of questionnaires with pre-printed categories - name, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on. I'm not a fan, so I'm not even going to say more about it.

Of course I still haven't given up hope that I'll find my album soon, then I will share some of it (not the glued pages!) in an extra post. As we like to say, "the houses loses nothing", it must be here somewhere!


Sources:

1. Werner Wilhelm Schnabel: Das Album Amicorum. In: Album : Organisationsform narrativer Kohärenz, ed. by Anke Kramer and Annegret Pelz. Göttingen : Wallstein Verlag, 2013, pages 213 - 285 (in German)
2. Antje Petty: "Dies schrieb Dir zur Erinnerung ..." From Album Amicorum to Autograph Book. On: Max-Kade-Institute for German-American Studies. University of Wisconsin-Madison
3. Stefanie Bock: Das Poesiealbum: Eine evangelische Erfindung. On: indeon, August 16, 2022 (in German)
4. Peg Frizzell: My Cherished Poesie Album. On: FanningSparks