Yearbooks
For over two hundred years, photos, stories, and signatures of college and high school students around the world have been compiled into yearbooks. Looking back on decades' worth of vintage yearbooks, you can trace the evolution of a school and its student body, take a glimpse into fashions and trends of years gone by, and even find a family member's picture. Yearbooks are a great tool for historians or genealogists who are looking for information on an ancestor or famous figure, offering photographs as well as information on school activities and graduation years. Whether you're trying to track down a specific year's volume or are just looking for local history, our sellers have a great selection of yearbooks to choose from.
While students kept scrapbooks of their school time all the way back to the 1600s, the first official yearbook was published at Yale University in 1806. As photography became more popular and more accessible, more colleges followed suit and the first high school yearbooks were published in the 1840s. In the 1860s and 1870s, photographer George Warren began using a single photo negative to produce multiple images and encouraged students to trade their photos with each other. These photos were then bound into books, creating what is now known as Warren yearbooks. As printing technology continued to improve, making it easier to churn out multiple copies of yearbooks more quickly, the medium really began to take off, and by the 1930s, yearbook companies were sending representatives to schools to help students buy yearbooks as keepsakes for the school year.
Here, you can purchase yearbooks from colleges, high schools, and middle schools, with many of them still in excellent condition. The yearbooks offered by AbeBooks sellers date all the way back to the early 1900s, offering a wonderful way to research student life over the past century.