“One should never write in albums”: analyzing nineteenth-century albums as social networks

“The price of the album is 5,000 euros”, stated the shop clerk at the specialized antiquarian bookstore in Madrid, “but if you pay cash, we can give you a discount”. That magnificent album with contributions from prominent writers such as José Zorrilla (1817– 1893) and Ramón de Campoamor (1817–1901) was certainly out of my financial reach, thus, I returned it reassuring her that I would think about it. After years doing research on the phenomenon of the nineteenth-century album in France and Spain, I know that antiquarian stores and auctions do not grant access to these objects of study beyond the quick glance permitted in the expectation of a pecuniary transaction. Fortunately, there are other somewhat more democratic spaces where one can perform an academic exploration of albums: the archives of national libraries and museums. The monetary value of the album at that Madrilenian antiquarian bookstore responds to a capitalist dynamic that is not necessarily linked to an acknowledgement of its significance as a vessel of history and stories. Someone will eventually purchase it to add to their collection, perhaps vaguely aware of its symbolic cultural meaning, but without the defined goal of analyzing its contents. Meanwhile, I will keep returning to the archives, those liminal spaces that, as Jacques Derrida declared, mark the “institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret” (1995, 10). It is precisely in that threshold of multiple realities where I can study albums as historical artifacts that offer a complex understanding of nineteenth-century ideas of the self, artistic exchanges, and gender dynamics in France and Spain.