Format: Eleven hardcover folio albums in cloth, most with blindstamp designs and gilded text, “Graham Collection” sticker on endpaper of most. Each album contains several hundred Victorian greeting cards or “paper scraps” laid down on restored album pages, and typescript notes by Marjorie Graham are interleaved between each page, dating (where possible) and describing each scrap in detail, albums 26 x 21.5cm to 36.5 x 27cm.

Marjorie Graham purchased and restored these albums between 1965 and 1975 in “distressing condition.” Each album was repaired and re-paged by D.S. Murray Pty Ltd of 45 Market Street, Sydney, at the expense of Marjorie.

A detailed list of the albums and additional images are available on request.

Marjorie Graham (Australian, 1924–1994) was “a pioneer collector of Australian pottery, glass and ephemera who assembled the Graham Collection, one of the most significant decorative arts collections in Australia. Graham developed an interest in 18th century English porcelain during the 1950s while she was working in the Press Clipping Services of the Country Press Association. She gradually became interested in collecting Australian items including pottery, glass, metal kitchenware, postcards, greeting cards, packaging, paper and sheet music.”

Marjorie’s meticulous research was one of the hallmarks of her collecting. Alongside her contribution to Australian pottery and decorative arts, her enthusiasm for ephemera was well ahead of its time as seen through these eleven albums of scraps, greeting cards and manuscript pages.

Marjorie Graham has been called “divinely eccentric, a keen devotee to lengthy telephone calls, [and] a lady of rare style and quality” (Kevin Fahy obituary for Graham in Australiana Magazine, 1994), but there is no doubt that she was also hyper-focused on taking the domain of “women’s activities” seriously. While the individual items in her collection may not have cost more than a few dollars at the time of purchase, Mrs Graham’s obsession with context, the time she poured into each item and the money she spent restoring these albums have turned the pursuit of collecting “women’s hobbies” into scholarship and has added greatly to their academic standing and appreciation.

Through these albums Marjorie has not only collected a world-class collection of paper scraps and greeting cards from England, Germany, the United States and Australia – consisting of lace cards, hinged scraps, chromolithographs and Biedermeier style cards – she went further, attempting to credit each piece with a publisher and date. Where names or initials are present on visiting card pages, Marjorie researched, in a pre-internet era, each one: tracing residence, occupation and relationship to the album’s original owner where possible.

They provide rich research potential for the study of women’s worlds in the Victorian period and this is one of the last major collections of Mrs Graham’s work outside of an institution. The albums were acquired from her estate auction at Lawson’s following her wishes upon her death in 1994, and have been left in the context in which she collected them.

In recognition of her contribution to the decorative arts, Marjorie Graham was made an honorary associate of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1973. Pieces from the Graham Collection can be found in the State Library NSW, and the Powerhouse Museum, and her house was documented for the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection.

Ref: SLNSW; Powerhouse Museum; Easley, A. (2019), Scrapbooks and Women’s Leisure Reading Practices, 1825–60, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, issue 15(2); AFR 15.9.1994; Australiana, August 1994, vol. 16 no. 3.