The 60 Leather-Bound Scrapbooks

When I was ten years old, I started receiving publicity for my painting in the National Gallery at such an early age. Of course, like any child, I was fascinated to see my face in the newspapers, and especially since it started happening very often. Press agencies and photographers started coming to my house and photographing "the little genius." A quite tidy pile of cuttings and photos mounted up over a couple of years - and then when I finished "The Battle Scene," that I was painting there at the time, the publicity started again! Well at that time for all sorts of reasons I was on the move and like a rolling stone, from when I was about twelve, I had nowhere really to live and certainly nowhere safe to store any possessions. And so I gave this precious pile of papers to Bar, my great-aunt who had more or less brought me up until then, but had now moved into a little alms house owned by the local church, a tiny one-up-one-down cottage. She was happy to look after my first ever possessions, putting them all in a large lilac-coloured chocolate box (that had no chocolates left in it of course!). From that moment on I dreamed of one day having a book that I would be able to put all those wonderful papers and photos in; Scrapbooks. But it was to be a number of years before that dream was realised - only to become a project that grew to a size almost bigger than myself, much like "The Magician's Apprentice."

By the time I was twenty-one I was living in Morocco. I became very successful there and so had plenty of money. I was still thinking - dreaming - of having a scrapbook, more then than ever as things were really starting to happen that I felt were worth recording. I was receiving any number of interesting letters that I wanted to keep somewhere safe, from all sorts of diverse people on every strata of Society - from Richard Attenborough to Lord Mountbatten, from Blake Edwards to Dirk Bogarde and from eccentric American millionaires who wanted to adopt me and have me live with them in California to L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the so-called “religion' of Scientology!

Realising that I was in a country whose leather crafting was world famous, and that crafts in general were at a high standard, I put the two and two together and designed my famous scrapbook at last, to be calf-bound. It had to be quite large as it was to contain so many 10'x 8' photos, as well as letters that I didn’t wish to fold. I found some quite thick paper that I liked that was a lovely shade of green, not too light, not too dark, that was a perfect background colour to absolutely any pictures or papers I placed against it. Voila, my first scrapbook arrived. I was so thrilled, it was worth the wait. When I returned to England about a year later, armed with my scrapbook, I retrieved my precious chocolate box from Bar and spent some happy months sticking in all my paraphernalia. But guess what? By then, I had more papers and things than the book could contain! Particularly since at that same time Bar had given me a lot of old papers and sepia photos from the 20’s, pertaining to my family history. So I found a bookbinder in London who said he could do the job and voila! My second scrapbook! By the time I met my second wife ten years later, I had six of them, all beautifully bound in calf, all with lovely green sheets of paper full of the most amazing documents and photographs, as by then my journeys were getting really interesting, from staying with the Bolshoi Ballet Company in Moscow to working in the same studio in Marrakech that Winston Churchill had once used, to meeting and portraying just about everyone, including the prime-minister of Malta...who later wrote me a letter about how much he had enjoyed our meeting and the portrait I had made of him - a letter to be found in the scrapbooks of course.

To my delight, I discovered my new love’s hobby was collecting family mementos; having done this since she was very young, she had any number of chocolate boxes full of irresistible looking papers and things (including her tiny first tooth!) And so my first serious gift to her was twelve of these huge scrapbooks, but this time at least bound not in leather, but in hessian, at her request. She spent three years sticking everything in, by which time her life in papers sort of joined up where we had met, and so we joined forces and I got a whole lot of new books made, back to being bound in calf. But because the books were now to contain the assortment of things that two very memorabilia-obsessed people might collect in their world wide wanderings, naturally I had to have the books made a little larger in format, and a lot thicker. The new and subsequent ones became so heavy that my then wife couldn’t pick them up. No matter, I was pretty healthy and strong, and would heft one up onto a table whenever she wished to peruse for a while.

Following this hobby with a passion, we used to joke about how awful it would be if ever we separated; who would get these marvellous scrapbooks? By now I had had several made to contain reproductions of every drawing and painting I had done thus far, and so the collection had arrived at no less than sixty volumes! And that was on top of the dozen I had had made for my wife. Also I had become a quite serious photographer, and we never stopped travelling and meeting very unusual people, from the richest and most powerful to the poorest and most un-noticed, and so the books contained also a fairly unique documentation of two fairly extraordinary lives.

I have to add here that this hobby definitely grew to an obsession. To the point where these books came to contain: all correspondence received from all over the world, including the countless postcards we sent to each other when apart. All utility bills, telephone, electricity and suchlike. All theatre/cinema tickets. Bus/coach/train and ’plane tickets. Unusual shopping bags! If we stopped by the roadside for a coffee, into the scrapbooks would go the little receipt. All cafe/restaurant bills. Labels off favourite bottles of wine we drank. So you see, it had to stop, and it finally did.

To cut a long story short we did finally separate. And by that time my wife, who quickly became my ex-wife, didn’t want anything to do with “those bloody books!” not even her own dozen; anyway, she had nowhere to store them and I did, but with no interest in them myself any more either, I must confess. And so they followed me around the world. I paid a very high price for holding onto them, for example carrying every one of them up five flights of old rickety stairs in Paris once, to my top-floor apartment, all sixty volumes!

They finally ended up living with me in Bali, where at last I really had plenty of space for them. Unfortunately, the climate there was so hot and humid that the poor books suffered appallingly, the tissues between the pages getting stuck together, and photos fading. Since I rarely even glimpsed them it was only when I moved from there to India after six years that I noticed their terrible state of deterioration as they were being packed up. Nothing to do.

When I had many of my possessions shipped to England, this time about seven years later and in three huge sixty-foot containers, I discovered that the dozen books of my ex-wife had all been eaten by silverfish. There was nothing but a large pile of dust where I had stored them, separately from the others. My Indian estate manager organised a Hindu priest to come and do a puja for that pathetic pile of dust, a ceremony that sent it and its Spirit up to whichever gods take care of things like that in India.

The collection of sixty, somewhat the worse for wear volumes, was finally in a safe resting place. My Soul-mate, Fanny, the wife I had been searching for through all those years and adventures, was finally with me, and she was the one who made me realise the importance of these tomes. The value of them as a record of a unique life if nothing else. And really there was something else; their priceless value as records of a whole era, say from 1900 to 1980, the date of the scraps and photos in the last one I ever worked on, at which moment in my life I moved from Portugal to New York, where I lived for a number of years - without recording any of it or even keeping any “scraps.” Eventually I extracted a collection of the most beautiful photos from all those albums and made up the book “Anthony Christian’s Seen,” which we will be publishing some time in the future. I will eventually find someone who can restore our large leather-bound scrapbooks, and they will become a perfect and permanent part of the Ichor Museum.

Anthony Christian

• Check out the Publicity Section to see some of the Newspaper Articles in these Amazing Scrapbooks

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