Sally Spiegel was marketing rock bands for Sony Music when she designed her first scrapbook. In the industry lingo the books are called “wrap-ups”–collections of artist’s photos, articles, ads. Spiegel had been in the music business for 15 years but had never created a wrap-up, so she asked a coworker to show her how. She wanted her wrap-ups to be exceptional and decorated them from cover to cover: in one a chain of guitars surrounded the sales figures for Chris Whitley’s first CD; in another the band members of Alice in Chains were ogled by cutout characters from Alice in Wonderland. Periodically Sony handed out awards for the wrap-ups, and Spiegel’s first three books were all winners.
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“I got to be the artist,” she recalls. “As much as I’ve always loved music, I don’t play any instruments. When it was my turn to shine I took advantage of it.”
Assembling scrapbooks for family and friends is one thing, but doing it for a stranger is another thing entirely. It’s “like putting a puzzle together…. People will say, ‘You really captured Mark’ or ‘You really captured mom.’ But I really don’t know the person.” Portrait painters do the same thing. “It’s both personal and not personal. You’re trying to capture the essence of a person.” When the project is finished, the client will come back and collect his life again, but some of it stays with Spiegel. “I start out with something that’s completely foreign–I don’t know their history, their likes and dislikes–and by the end I feel a lot closer to them.”
