If you’ve read my previous post on this topic, you’ll know that I collect old yearbooks. (I hear you all calling me a nerd—and I don’t care. Yell away. You’re missing out.) While reading through another not-so-old (1980s) yearbook today, I was struck by a few things and inspired to write about just why I like reading through old yearbooks so much.

Some reasons were obvious to me; others not so much. Here are some of them (I say “some” because I never know, I might come up with more in the middle of the night):

The Smell

This is a light one to start off with. I love old yearbooks because, just like other old books, they have that wonderful smell. Of old pages, ink, and probably a bit of must. That is, if they’re actually real yearbooks, not those copies that Classmates puts out. No siree, I like me some real old yearbooks, please.

Also, the sound—sometimes the well-used ones creak or crack when you open them. This alarms me until I realize if I treat it gently the book is not going to fall apart any time soon. Then the creak just becomes a devastatingly familiar, heart-warming creak.

The Nostalgia

Yes, old yearbooks do produce a bit of nostalgia in me—which I suppose is not entirely possible, since I was not alive when any of the yearbooks I own were printed. However, I love history and would seriously consider jumping into a time machine if one existed. With the research I have done on different time periods, I can look at these old yearbooks and realize just how much time as passed, just how much has changed. Not that the past is better than the present, or the present is better than the past, but . . . each moment in history is precious. (Feel free to gag, I know that line was cheesy as heck.)

Someone Else’s Life

This mainly applies to yearbooks that have signatures in them, but can apply to all of them. Yearbooks enable me to see what someone else’s life, in another time period and another place, might have been like. If there aren’t any signatures, I can still look around and get a feel for the place and time period—what the student may or may not have been into. The yearbook may hype football and prom; maybe the yearbook owner liked that stuff, or not. Still, any slang, fashions, music, etc., were all around this student, and influenced him or her. The yearbook enables me to imagine myself in his or her life.

Of course signatures help tremendously with this. Signatures reveal if the person had a boy or girlfriend; what the person’s friendships were like; what kind of language they used; what they liked to do; where they planned to go to college (if they planned to); and a myriad of other things. Signatures are gold mines, really, because they reveal life as it was for regular people, from the mouths of regular people—fellow teenagers.

The Culture

Thus, these yearbooks are a great glimpse into the culture of their day. True, the 1960s were really not that long ago at all, but culture does tend to change quickly, especially pop culture. And each decade really is different from the next, although they are not exclusive; each one builds on the previous too.

Yearbooks are great sources for real down-to-earth culture, though, because they don’t give me big, historic events, or big, important, people—they are simply catching one year in the life of a group of regular high school students. So from the text I can learn how people wrote and what slang was “in”; from pictures I can learn what people wore, how males and females styled their hair, what kind of cars teenagers drove, what the inside and outside of the school itself looked like, what the houses looked like, etc. I also sometimes learn what regular Joes thought about bigger situations: for instance, in my 1977 Little Rock yearbook, kids comment on everything from smoking and entertainment to the presidential election and gas prices.

I also learn a lot from the ads that are in the back of many yearbooks. These ads tell me what businesses were in certain locations (that may or may not still be existing); what places commonly advertised; what places were around for food; and what advertising techniques were used.

Humor

Students occasionally commented on these ads, too. There is occasionally some great humor in the yearbooks themselves, but more frequently great humor occurs in signatures from other students. For instance, in one yearbook a girl makes fun of a Godfather’s pizza ad that seems to portray Godfather’s as “the place” to go. In another yearbook, the yearbook’s owner makes fun the fact that one of his female friends, whose last name is “Sudbury” (and who signs her name “[First name] Suds”) was asked about beer by yearbook staff. (I’m not making this up.)

Also, I find some really fantastic names—names I never knew were names (and probably aren’t in many places). Especially in my Tulsa yearbooks. I love Tulsa, so I’m not bashing it, but boy do some of those names take the cake. I don’t want to just throw them out to the public, but trust me on this. You can find some really unusual names in old yearbooks.

The Angst

Oh, the angst. And drama (mostly in the case of girls). It’s insane, people. It’s also really fascinating, because again, you’re being let in to someone else’s life—and for a writer like me, this is gold. There is a ton of angst in my yearbooks: girls wishing their friend “good luck with so-and-so (her boyfriend)”; boys saying “I wish you weren’t dating so-and-so,” or “If you ever break up with so-and-so give me a call”; one boy writing a long, one-page, very sad love note to a girl he loves and is dating but who obviously doesn’t see it the same way, and is trying to get her old boyfriend back. In another yearbook a girl resents her parents; in another the yearbook owner, a guy, seems to have two girls dating him (or at least wanting to date him). In another yearbook the book owner is planning to marry her out-of-high school boyfriend, and it seems her parents don’t know.

The drama can be a bit too much sometimes, as can the angst, but since I’m fairly distant from it all it’s more entertaining than upsetting. I appreciate the chance to get to see into a teenager’s personal life, to get to know who their friends were, how they thought and spoke and acted, what they liked to do, if they were into dating, etc. Old yearbooks give me the chance to know someone from a different time and (likely) place than I, and give me fodder for character creation. It doesn’t get much better than that.