Is this a historical book about history? Some things have legs and, like an old pair of vintage 501’s, Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of ...

A Public Intimacy (a life through scrapbooks)

By Paul Buck. Bookworks 2011.

It often gets lost how we arrive at certain points that open up other points and cross over other paths that take us on a fresh trip. This ‘scrapbook of a scrapbook’ is just one means of arresting ‘development’ and settling down into a still activatable past. Stretching out from the mid-1960s until the present day we here encounter a writer (or more aptly put: a cultural catalyst) as he sifts through his scrapbooks and includes us in the private musings of a cultural life lived more or less on the margins.