SCRAP BOOK

The Book

From visually degraded examples of Xeroxed office humor to elegant works of full-color art, SCRAP BOOK is full of zany inspiration, moments of meditation and a constant reminder of its motto: “No Sense Makes Sense.” Wrestlers, monsters, devils, freaks, strippers, fetish models, stag queens, skeletons, body parts, Aztec sculptures, gorillas, dinosaurs, and magic will befuddle your brain and slap your subconscious silly. This guided tour through pre-computer digital-age hand-collaged scrapbooks is a kind of compact reference or visual index that Glenn Bray shares with other like-minded artists and collectors. His deliberate curating and creating of collections can be seen as a form of artwork in itself, and is largely self-taught and unique in the artworld.

"I started putting together old scrapbooks, those big old 1940’s and 1950’s books with blank pulp pages tied together with string that contained the worst level archival pulp paper imaginable, back in the late 1960’s. You could buy these old scrapbooks at the Salvation Army for $1.00, and sometimes they even were half-filled with other people’s cut-outs. (And yes, I DID save and print some!)

I was collecting a lot of comic books and magazines at the time, but a lot of other zines and newspapers that were passing though my hands didn’t need complete saving; maybe a photo here and an article there. I would cut them and save them in a pile until I thought I had enough to combine some sense of imagery on a few pages. This lasted way until the late 1990’s, and possibly a bit beyond, when by then you could just save image files on the computer.

I must have had at least a dozen different sized filled scrapbooks by the early 2000’s and the paper was starting to mummify, also killing off my saved cargo, and I realized that in a few years they were going to turn to dust.

So I scanned most of the pages, bought some really nice paper and went to STAPLES with a flash drive and told them to just run half of them through the printer, turn them over and complete the printing on the other side. Voilà!, beautifully preserved prints. I had the one copy bound by a professional bookbinder and put it on my shelf.

Over the years, visitors would look at my one copy and ask if I couldn’t make another for them.

Working with Frank Young as co-editors on the Art Young book, he had sent me some print-on-demand books that he had produced. He convinced me that I should also do one. With fresh eyes on the old pages, I was able to re-direct/re-arrange the pages in a more meaningful way, plus add a lot of stuff that hadn’t found a place in my Blighted Eye book."

- Glenn Bray

Preview

Bio

"There are many different sorts of collectors. Freud attributed the condition to bad toilet training, but he was often something of a kill-joy. Of course, at one end of the spectrum there are The Hoarders, those who turn their homes into dangerous obstacle courses, with treasures and trash combustibly mixed together. Anyone who ever walked through Bill Blackbeard's large Victorian home, The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a three-story house with only narrow paths between the stacked-high bound volumes of newspapers absolutely everywhere but the bathroom (for fear of water-damage), might have diagnosed him with that pathology. Though discerning and prescient (Bill knew the difference between trash and treasure better than most everyone) he tried to collect it All... and it has served my art form well.

Timeline

The book is complete and will be going to the printer within a month after the end of the campaign. From there, expected delivery time to our fulfillment center is roughly three months from approve-to-print date.

We're aiming for a December 2023 delivery date (just in time for the holidays!) and Zoop will keep supporters updated throughout this process.