Our brand-new Giant Scrapbooks have arrived, just in time for a Summer Holiday project. I’m such a fan of the scrapbook. The scrapbook diary I kept for a month at the age of five when my family returned on holiday to Australia for the first time would be my single most treasured possession if it weren’t for the fact that nothing will induce my mother to relinquish it. On each page there is a single laborious sentence summing up our doings for that day, and a picture to illustrate it. ‘On Monday I peeled some prawns for tea.’ ‘We went to the park and it poured and poured.’ ‘I found a nice bug in the beans.’ Every event I recorded is crystal clear in my memory over 40 years later.

So a scrapbook is ideal for a child’s holiday diary and drawing book, or for preserving their paintings, photographs and even scraps of fabric from your favourite of their outgrown clothes. But of course scrapbooking has serious artistic bona fides as well: the creation of assemblages of images, the putting together of fragments to create something new, can be a profoundly serious as well as playful occupation. Think of Cecil Beaton or even Kurt Schwitters.

A book that you might keep and refer to forever needs a good substrate. Our scrap books have covers of our glorious patterned card, in a wide variety of designs, and 32 pages of brightly coloured, very good quality uncoated paper. The book measures a generous 43 cm high by 31 cm wide. There is a discreet Cambridge Imprint mark on the inside back cover and no other labelling. They are absolutely ideal for a child’s holiday diary and drawing book, for collecting recipes, for creating a mood book, for general scrap-booking or any other project that you may want to preserve for a long time.