Customer Reviews

America's Wartime Scrapbook - Pearl Harbour to V-J

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This is the ninth of Robert Opie's Scrapbooks and the first using material not from his vast collection, appropriately this covers the US war years while his first book covered the British war years. An amazing 1500 items, mostly printed ephemera, from the collections of Charles Numark and Martin Jacobs are displayed in the still-life photo style that Opie created for his wonderful Scrapbooks.

The book opens out to spreads fifteen by twenty-one inches wide. Each one has a large themed still-life photo covering, Pearl Harbor, Home Front posters, ads, comics, greeting cards, magazine covers, movie posters, civil defence, V-mail, newspaper front pages, victory gardens, kids games, sweetheart jewelry, patches and medals, tobacco products, popular music sheets and more. It can get a bit overwhelming with so much material to look at but this is why I love these Scrapbooks, you can return to them again and again and still find something new.

Another book, 'United We Stand', with patriotic material from Richard Perry's wartime collection covers the same area but unfortunately it is rather badly organised and only has three hundred items but a book that will perfectly complement 'America's Wartime Scrapbook' is Stan Cohen's 'V for Victory', an exhaustive photo record of the Home Front. If you lived through the war years both these books will be instant nostalgia.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This book is very colorful and has lots of interesting items. It has pretty fair organization but if one looks carefully and has knowledge in the area of homefront collecting, many fake and reproduction items abound. Nothing is more deceiving than smuggling in fakes to augment a collection that wasnt large enough to complete the project. Also you can see where Jacob's has reused items in different shots to once again make up for an inadequate pool of resources for publication. Overall I'd buy it but be on the lookout for the fakes like the bowling pins on the back cover!!...