He acts as if he's trying to tell us something.

This is as much as I know about the person who made this scrapbook: he or she lived in South Carolina around the 1960s.

I bought it for six dollars at an antique shop in the Pee Dee section of Northeastern South Carolina in 2013, and the person who sold it to me didn't remember anything about its origins. Since the one recognizably local picture is from the town of Darlington, I'm assuming the scrapbooker lived in Darlington County--and judging by the clippings from Progressive Farmer, probably on a farm. Given the obvious passion for farm equipment, it's probably likely, though of course not certain by any means, that this person was male. He could have been a boy when he made the book, but my instinct is that he was more likely a developmentally disabled man. Because of the outwardly random-seeming selection of items, I'm reminded of a collection of clippings kept by my great-aunt, who had Down Syndrome, around the same era. The seeming disregard for text also suggests that the collector didn't read.

But this is as much as we can know about the scrapbook: everything in it meant something to him.

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Back cover