can I give a big shout-out to scrapbooking's major hottie Elsie Flanagan!

Besides just being plain nasty to the many women, men and children for whom scrapbooking is a fun, relaxing hobby, (one which, for some people, brings some meaning to their lives, by the way), Helfand has made a huge marketing gaffe by insulting the very people who would likely buy her book in the first place.

I'm not overweight. I have a PhD (from a Yale rival, by the way). I'm Roman Catholic. I scrapbook for fun, and to do something with all my photos, and for the creative outlet, and I love it, and my family and friends love my albums and their celebration of our happily ordinary lives.

And what makes what they did back in the 1920s any less "cheesy" than what people do now?

I love the idea of Helfand's book, but it's terribly unfortunate that she has been so nasty about modern scrapbooking. I certainly will never buy her book, and I doubt the millions of other scrapbookers out there will either.

I am disheartened to read such snobbery coming from fellow graphic designers. Scapbooking has a very old and honorable history -- like Ms. Helfand I have collected a few over the years at estate and yard sales, as well as have some from my family (though like the previous poster, my relatives were guilty of keeping thousands of loose unlabeled pictures and items that can't even be identified today).

I can't see where anyone can reasonably confuse the precise work of an professional graphic designer with the paste/glue/cutouts of the home scrapbooker. You'd have to be a pretty lame, insecure artist to find this to be a threat! I don't think Alice Waters or Paul Prudhomme are shaking in their books because I cooked dinner last night by myself. Ordinary people are allowed to create; indeed it would be a shabby and lame world if they were hampered because of the snobbery of "real artists".

The larger problem in our culture is how our obsession with perfection and "professionalism" makes people feel, often from early childhood, that they cannot create because their results are not "perfect enough". Most children adore drawing, painting, making music, singing, etc. and then at a certain age (roughly 8-9 I find), they start saying "I am not good enough", usually because of the harsh criticism of a teacher or parent. Then that individual stops making art FOR A LIFETIME. How sad is that?

There are loads of problems, including poor pay and underemployment, in the field of graphic design but I assure you that none of us working artists have lost a dime because of HOME SCRAPBOOKERS. (Indeed, as someone noted, a lot of new jobs have appeared -- really good creative jobs -- designing scrapbooking stickers, albums and emphemera.)

EVERYTHING in our modern world has become overly slick and commercialized, so it is hardly surprising that a girl in 1912 might create her own scrapbook out of little bits and pieces of fabric or cut up magazines....and that a modern woman might instead go to the store and buy up a lot of cute, pre-made materials instead. Just as kids today prefer to play computer games instead of going outside and just PLAYING. But that's a much larger issue, i.e., why we as a culture prefer artifical, manufactured experience to authentic experience. Jumping on innocent scrapbooks as the culprit is both clueless and wrong.

Graphic designers ourselves have fallen for this hook line and sinker, because our OWN work is now all done on computers, with the identical software packages (Quark, InDesign, Photoshop) and all the same filters and the same typefaces, so a heck of an awful lot of it looks JUST EXACTLY THE SAME....the same drop shadows. The same type treatments. The sad fact is you do NOT have to be as good, as skilled, as you had to be in the past (pre-Macintosh) to work as a graphic designer. I am 53 and I work daily with younger designers who could not draw a human face, could not spec type, could not do a marker layout IF THEIR VERY LIVES DEPENDED ON IT. Yet they are paid, often as much or more than I have been, because they are "hot computer jockeys" and/or experts in some software package. This doesn't precisely reak of creativity or originality.

SVS-NS, I have stories of being ripped off or treated like I was "dabbling in some fun job that didn't need to be paid", and I can probably top every story you tell about dumbass clients or people who think the secretary can do my job just as well. The reality is that the field has shrunk dramatically as computers do many of the things we used to do by hand (sizing photographs with proportion wheels, retouching stuff with airbrushes, etc.) and AT THE SAME TIME, schools are churning out graphic designers like the field was booming. When I was in college, only two schools in my entire state offered a graphic design degree; now more than a dozen do. But there are about half as many jobs today as there were in 1978; go figure. The result is often a lot of underemployed, angry, frustrated designers forced to compete for a very limited number of jobs. No wonder employers feel very empowered to exploit us.

Be angry about that. Don't be angry at scrapbookers. I personally am delighted and enchanted when ordinary people feel empowered to create, and it doesn't matter what they do -- it's the impulse to make beauty out of disorder that is moving. Paper emphemera is beautiful, has historical meaning and context...it is vital and alive. These scrapbooks that may look so "corny" to you now will be essential keepsakes of our social history in a hundred years. They will show future generations what we loved, what we valued and what we thought was beautiful.

That matters, even if it is in a relatively modest way. On the other hand, I wonder if future generations will value your (and my) sales brochures or annual reports -- I doubt it.