The Girl Graduate: scrapbook of Victoria Koenig, 1915 graduate of Indianapolis Manual Arts High School

The album is designed and illustrated by Louise Perrett and Sarah K. Smith, published in Chicago by the Reilly and Britton Co. Limp green suede in the Roycrofters fashion; 8vo, 189pp. In Good to Very Good condition: endpapers are slightly patinated bronze-colored, but pastedowns have largely perished and linger only around the edges to pleasing aesthetic effect. Binding stuffed beyond its intended capacity, causing some shifting of the textblock. Coupled with the limp wraps, a little fidgety but easy enough to handle. Housed in mylar.

This copy has been personalized by sixteen-year-old Victoria Koenig upon her June 1915 graduation from Manual Arts High School in Indianapolis. It neatly encapsulates her life and school, full of artfully composed and cheerfully captioned original photographs. Subjects range from her cat Tootsie, to candid snapshots and staged portraits that often have a quirky feature—smokestacks in the background, a teacher balancing atop a brick, a "swimmer" barely staying afloat. Her photos also capture the emerging fashions of the era. In contrast to the very traditionally frocked teachers, she and her school friends appear in straight silhouettes with long, oversized coats and terrific hats. One photo is captioned, "What a time we had with our looks!" Little drawings, inscriptions and inside jokes grace each section, including goofy poems like, "Edna and me is twins / We aint got no awful sins / We is just as straight as pins / Some bad boys calls us thins."

Victoria was heavily involved with the Masomas, a women's organization at the school. Many items related to their meetings appear in the book, including papers from games. She was fond of theater. She played Lydia Bennett in the school's dramatization of Pride and Prejudice and collected other programs. Two pockets in the back of the album contain dried flower petals (with a calling card that says "I wish I were in your boots") and various paper forms, including a vaccination slip.

The album is also heavily populated with clippings from the local and school newspapers. Many have no mention of her but celebrate her classmates' achievements, especially other young women she's clearly proud to be pals with. There is also a lot of coverage of the school itself, which was celebrating twenty years in operation and primed to be renamed Emmerich Manual High School in 1916. 

Victoria Koenig was a lifelong Indianapolis resident. After graduating, she married a well-known dance teacher, David B. Brenneke. The circumstances of the marriage are unknown--whether she had fallen for him or was pressured into the arrangement. Brenneke came from the same German immigrant community as her parents and was forty years older than her. He had been previously widowed and unable to renew his naturalization papers after the outbreak of WWI. His marriage to Victoria was brief: he poisoned himself a little over a year after they married, making the Indianapolis Star front page: "Brooding over citizenship is suicide cause" (May 7, 1918). She was remarried to Joseph Rentsch in 1920 and was a homemaker. She remained connected to the Masomas and the school--her 1965 alumni reunion badge is also present.