Behind the Pages: The Making of Suomi College’s First Yearbook
Written By:
Finlandia Foundation
By J. Chopp, Archivist at Finnish American Heritage Center Historical Archive
Sometimes an unexpected file I run across while looking for something else in the archive stacks makes me smile. In the Suomi College records, I came across all the working files used to create the first yearbook at the school in 1915. Materials include letters and business cards from the area businesses that sponsored the publication, hand-written pages with references for placement of photos, and a list of rates for sponsorship advertisements.
My favorite items to look at are the original hand-drawn cartoons a student created that are printed in the yearbook. It is most fortunate that they appear to be signed by the artist, W. Tikkanen, so that even more than one hundred years later, we can still give them credit for their hard work and appreciate their sense of humor.
College students today might be very bewildered as to how this sheaf of paper could possibly be used to produce a full-fledged yearbook. Compared to modern technology used to edit digital files and crop photos with a few clicks, shuffling through the file one can see not only hand-written copy, but meticulous hand-drawn crop marks and corrections made by the editors. It’s an interesting “behind-the-scenes” look into how such books were produced during a by-gone era.
