Scrapbook industry woos male crafters

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Apr 7, 2007 by Kelly Crow The Wall Street Journal

Man books can veer far from traditional topics. Thomas Cain, a jet mechanic in Richmond Hill, Ga., says his wife scrapbooks about their children, but his own scrapbook memorializes his pet project: restoring a 1967 Fastback Mustang. His 50-page "Mustang Book" features before-and-after shots of the white car with black-leather interior, with receipts, progress reports and a close-up of the stitched-up finger he injured while working on the engine. The closing shot: a photo of him crying on the curb after learning that thieves had crushed his car for scrap metal.

"That book made my lawyer's job so easy," Cain says.

Men and scrapbooks actually go way back. Thomas Jefferson pasted letters, event programs, pressed flowers and favorite quotations into volumes then known as "commonplace books." Mark Twain pasted reviews of his own work into books, and even patented two scrapbook models that earned him $50,000, according to Susan Tucker, a scrapbook historian and archivist at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Jim Rickard, a graphic designer in St. Paul, Minn., says that even in an Internet age, men are concerned with how best to set down their stories. Rickard, whose wife sells scrapbook goods, scoffed at making one until his parents died a few years ago. In their closet, he discovered -- and ultimately tossed out -- boxes of photos featuring people he couldn't identify. "It hit me that I wanted my kids and grandkids to know what mattered to me," he says.

Minneapolis TV producer and filmmaker Wes Thomsen raised $60,000 and spent several months last spring making a documentary, "Scrapped," about his own journey. "At first I assumed all these women were just clutching order in their lives, but I realized I was ignoring a lot in my life by not being willing to be vulnerable in these books," he says. While his film has yet to find a distributor, he has sold 15,000 DVD copies after screenings held at scrapbook conventions in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.

For some men, the emotions are easier to embrace than the crafting world. Isaias Rodriguez, a technology program manager in Seattle, says he took up scrapbooking because he wanted a daddy- daughter activity that didn't involve "always going to the movies." At first, Rodriguez says he sometimes felt frustrated because he wanted to build symmetrical pages lined with pictures; his 4-year- old Dru preferred to "scribble" and "lay on the glitter." Five books later, Dru is 11 and she enjoys photography, Mount Rainier and air shows just like her father does. And when they go to craft stores, he says, "she's still my buffer."

Meanwhile, women aren't uniformly thrilled by the scrapping-man movement. Men are still largely banned from the country's 20-odd scrapbook retreats -- where women gather for catered meals, manicures and lots of "cropping" -- because those retreats typically sleep six to a bedroom and have communal bathrooms. And groups like the 30 women who gather regularly as the Fort Bragg Croppin' Mamas of Fort Bragg, N.C., worry that their conversational camaraderie will suffer if men join in. "The women wouldn't talk about sex if there was a man around," says Tiffany Adams, a Croppin' Mama. "And we'd need a new name."