I’m curious to find out how this has varied over time. I went to a public high school and I think my yearbook cost $60 or so. There are some ads for local businesses, but most of the ads are bought by parents to congratulate their children.
They’re keepsake or a fundraiser or both, depending on how you look at it. Funds from yearbook sales may have helped pay for the prom, but I don’t know for sure.
The quotes were chosen by the students to reflect some 100-character bit of wisdom, or humor, or to be stupid or whatever other reason.
At my school, it did. The seniors had the largest photos, and the only ones in color, but smaller pictures were taken of everyone. I think the younger classes had successively smaller photos.
Students and an advisor.
Even if I did have a scanner, I’d probably pass on this one.
I meant to add- these things are growing in popularity as far as I can tell. Most people are talking about their high school yearbooks here, but colleges also do them (they may have started the tradition). My junior high school also had a yearbook, and I think it’s getting more common for elementary schools to do them as well. This is a custom that should probably be withering and dying as digital camera use increases, but I think it’s doing the opposite.
I’d post mine but back in the olden days there were no such things as electronic copies of photos. Since I haven’t seen the paper copies in 20 years, I don’t have any scanned. I might be able to dig out a cheerleading picture and and scan it for you but I have no idea where my individual senior picture is.
I wouldn’t mind scanning a few pages of mine, but I don’t feel right doing it without permission of the people in the pictures. Which, of course, I don’t have. Oh, well!
I still have my high-school yearbook (go class of '81!), complete with ads, scribbled notes and signatures, listings of the clubs, teacher photographs by department, descriptions of field trips and school events, and the student photographs. The grade-13s got larger pics and captions; all the other grades got smaller pics and their names only.
I had a yearbook when graduating from senior public school (grade 8), but it’s long gone. All I really remember about it is that Andrew Mountjoy wrote ‘you are a fag’ in it, but then he was a jerk anyways. I’ve posted before what an evil school that was.
There was no yearbook when I graduated from college.
Class of '69. We bought our yearbooks, but the price tag was nominal (unlike class rings, another incredibly stupid expense!)
I was on the yearbook staff at my school (school newspaper, too, but that’s a different story) and our faculty sponsor gave us a short history of the yearbook. Allegedly, the tradition started with Ivy League colleges and spread from there. It was primarily for keepsake purposes, but in time provided some interesting and occasionally valuable information about who went to school where and when. I guess it’s hard to claim a Yale pedigree if your face ain’t in the yearbook.
We sold advertising to help defray the cost of preparing our yearbook, and most area high schools still do that. The most attention was paid to the senior pictures, each of which was (as now) an individual portrait selected from a private (and privately funded) sitting. Our protraits had listed under them the activities in which we participated throughout our high school careers, as well as one or two words about career choices. (Mine said “Broadcaster” because that’s what I thought I would pursue when I was in high school. I’ve spent most of my adult life in print journalism, but once again, here I am …) I collected as many “autographs” as I could at the time because my mother told me they’d be very meaningful one day. Once again, Mom was wrong.
In really small towns/schools, yearbooks contain grades K-12; my father still has yearbooks from Yuma, Colo., when I was in elementary school there.
My three year high school had over 2000 students and a graduating class of over 700. The senior pictures were bigger than the other student’s ones but there were still over twenty per page and so no room for anything other than the names. Also the seniors were in color and the others in B&W.
There were group shots for various school groups like choir, drama club, all of the sports teams, student council and whatever else people who gave a shit about high school must have done. Also a few pages for senior awards like Most Likely to Succeed and Prettiest Eyes.
Yearbook was an actual class. The people who took this optional class were in charge of putting together the content and getting it published. With about a week to go before the end of the year, those who wanted to do so bought one. I think that there was a cheaper pre-order price so that they could get a good idea how many to make.
I dutifully bought them each year and had my friends sign them. I graduated High School in 1982. About two years ago I found my old yearbooks and started to look through them. It was incredibly painful. I threw them all in the garbage and it felt great. The only thing of interest in them were a couple of amusing and odd inscriptions from a teen aged Crispin Glover.
It was an involved process in my day. They had to send out harvesters to cut the reeds, then process the papyrus. Then we had to hire painters and caligraphers to do all the data entry, and sculptors to make the stone blocks for student pictures. Shipping took forever.
I know what you said. “Have a great summer!” “Stay sweet and nice 4-ever!”
When I get home I’ll scan my senior yearbook page and put little black “Glamour Don’t” bars over everybody else’s eyes. I mean, when you see those pictures of Madonna’s yearbook they don’t bother to hide anybody else who’s next to “Ciccone” in her class, but, you know. I refuse absolutely and entirely to ever, ever show anybody any non-senior yearbook. Particularly anything involving middle school.
Most of the signings were so generic and insipid. “Stay Sweet!” “KIT 555-1234” was especially moronic, considering how many seniors went away to college or their first apartments within months of telling everyone else to Keep In Touch with a soon-to-be-outdated phone number. The yearbooks came with extra blank pages in front and back just to be signed, and it was oh so important to get that blankness filled in. The really cool girls used oddly colored ink to distinguish themselves.
The one almost practical use my yearbook ever saw? A male cousin moved into my town a year after I graduated high school and used my senior yearbook to scope out local girls. A whole week of him poring over the senior pictures calling me going “Do you know Stephanie L? How about Michelle G? Can you hook me up with Lisa K?” :rolleyes:
Luxury! I was one of the slaves who had to drag the twelve-ton stone blocks from the quarry to the sculptors’! At the end of the semester, there were only five of us left!
And three of them still wouldn’t sign my yearbook.
I had them from junior high through high school, but I don’t have my high school ones anymore. I wish I did because my junior year I swapped my picture form with a foreign exchange students so I had some weird kid from Finlands picture under my name and vice versa. They actually threatened to make me pay some insane amount of money for “ruining” the year book, but I pled ignorance.
I do think that my mom had to pay something for me flipping the bird in the senior group picture that had to be retaken though, but there were so many that did it it was a pittance.
The yearbook committee organized it. In my school, it was an extracurricular activity/class (they spent one hour a day in school doing it and also at various points during the year their evenings and weekends). They were competitive and entered and won yearbook competitions.
The costs were split between the school, advertisements sold to local businesses and parents, and students (about $40/yearbook about 15 years ago. My guess would be the price has gone up).
There was a picture of every student in the book as an individual (more or less - a few were missed), a group picture of every club, sport, or activity several staged pictures of big events during the year along with text (think human interest newspaper stories). My school didn’t use candids or quotes for legal reasons.
The books would arrive about 2-3 weeks before the end of the school year, and you’d ask your friends to sign. You’d save off big sections for close friends who would write long paragraphs of memories…not-so-close friends would sign “have a great summer. don’t ever change, love _______.”
Last summer I attended my 30th Anniv. High School School Reunion. The organizers had scanned all the “portraits” of the attendees from our yearbook and had the pictures with your name printed on an ID tag to wear so others could recognize you.
Needless to say I look nothing like I did 30 years ago and I floored many a person.
Some of the hotties did indeed become cat-drag material, while others seemed to have stepped right out of the yearbook unchanged; quite remarkable actually.
FWIW, high school yearbooks seem to have become popular around the turn of the last century. The earliest ones often had scarcely any class information at all, but simply had some literary contributions intended to show how well-educated the class had turned out to be.
A little later, say from about 1900 through 1930, it was common to have a lot of gossipy in-jokes and references to class leaders and other prominent pupils. There’d also be advertisements from local businesses (which you still see today), and very many ads from business colleges where students could study for an additional few months to pick up some office skills. I’ve seen one yearbook from this era which, incredibly, gives the home addresses of every student! Another feature of the era was some sort of witticism for each portrait. For example, for each individual, it might state the “Natural Gift”, “Acquired Trick”, and “Future Accomplishment”–I’ve seen these given for one student as: “Thinking beautiful thoughts”, “Putting the thoughts into words”, and “Spelling the words as others do”. At this time there was often still the occasional literary contribution, usually in the form of poetry, which sometimes was pretty awful.
I wish I could tell the OP to go to the Los Angeles High School website and look at some century-old yearbooks they had put up there, but damn it, they seem to have taken them down. I used to love looking at those things.
