Keeping Chronicles

Keeping Chronicles is the latest book by Rosemary Sassoon. It intends to show the many ways handwritten and other documents from family archives and other sources are so valuable, not only to the family concerned, but to local as well as national museums.

The many examples within the book illustrate different categories such as letters, diaries, travel records, business and legal ones, personal scrapbooks, school books and cookery books etc. Also included is practical advice from professionals in the field about how to preserve such items and present them for safekeeping to museums.

Rosemary discusses her own memorabilia collection and shows how she has preserved these historical items. After giving talks on the matter of preserving written items, Rosemary was saddened to hear that so many people discarded such memorabilia, destroying family history in a minute, because they were unsure of how to preserve these items to keep. This book will inspire readers to start their own memorabilia collection.

Rosemary Sassoon has written over 30 books across a variety of academic and design subjects. She was originally a designer in textiles and various aspects of letterforms. Later she was asked to deal with serious handwriting problems in schools. This developed from educational into more medical aspects of the subject and resulted in a PhD from the University of Reading. Research then ensued Rosemary’s family of typesets, originally called Sassoon Primary, to find what typographic letters children could read the easiest. This was later developed for other purposes including as a stylistic model for handwriting. Both are widely used worldwide. Rosemary now lives in Australia.