Every Thursday, I review a book or blog related to scrapbooking.
Stories in Hand by Jessica Sprague
This book can be purchased as a print copy or an electronic copy. I bought the electronic copy. It was quite a bit cheaper this way ($17.95 for the print version and $6.95 for the electronic version). With the electronic version, you can use it both offline or online, however, the offline version also requires a password to view the book.
Stories in Hand is published by Northridge Publishing, which publishes many e-books. The set-up of the e-book is quite nice. You can mark up the e-book and save your spot if you have to close out of the book. You are also allowed to print the book out, which I will be doing as soon as I break down a buy more printer ink.
The book begins by reminding readers to be prepared to record their stories. Whether a person uses a pen and paper, a scrapbook, a computer, or an audio recorder is unimportant, as long as they are prepared in some way to record their stories.
From this reminder, Sprague gets right to the question prompts. This is a book of question prompts. There are scrapbook layouts throughout the book based on some of the question prompts, but this book is about getting people to record their stories. Throughout the book, Sprague directs readers to the web for instructions for the projects featured in the book.
Overall, I am glad I bought the e-book. I am primarily interested in the question prompts and not the layout ideas. I think if I had more interest in the layouts, then I might want the hard copy version. I wish that it was possible to get a list of all the questions in a slightly less pretty format. What I mean, is that it would be great to just get a list of the questions so that way I can just print out the questions and not the layouts. I suppose one reason this is not possible, is that then it would to easy for people to distribute copies of the questions without purchasing the book. Regardless, if you are interested in recording your stories and sometimes experience writer’s or scrapbooker’s block, then this book is for you.
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
