Discovering Friendship Books

While looking for collage materials for my recent piece Intertwined, I came across something I’d never heard of before: friendship books, or albums amicorum, from the 1500s. They were little hand-bound books people passed around for friends to fill with poems, drawings, notes, and pressed flowers.

I love how these books were layered with personal symbols, memories, and bits of beauty meant to be kept and shared. In a way, they feel like early scrapbook collages that tell a story about friendship and time.

It’s such a sweet reminder that the instinct to collect, create, and hold on to meaning through what we find and who we meet has always been there.