A Collection of Children’s School Notebooks from Around the World
For the past 15 years, the folks at the Exercise Book Archive have been compiling a collection of children’s school notebooks from around the world. In the extensive digital archive, you can find writings, drawings, and aimless doodling in exercise books from as far back as 1773 from countries like the US, Ghana, Latvia, Brazil, and Finland.
The Exercise Book Archive is an ever-growing, participatory archive of old exercise books that allows everyone to discover the history, education, and daily life of children and youth of the past through this unique material. The Archive includes hundreds of exercise books from more than 30 different countries and dated from the late 1700s to the early 2000s. It is preserved and managed by the Milan-based NPO Quaderni Aperti (literally, Open Exercise Books).
If you follow them on Instagram, they are pulling some interesting pieces out of the archive. And if you happen to have any old exercise books from your youth (or your parents’ or grandparents’ youth) lying around, you can donate them to the cause.
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