‘½ vol. not relevant’: The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell

The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell – celebrated aerophilatelist and collector of aeronautica –reveals a great deal about its maker and the social and political context of early flight history in Britain. It is argued here that a ‘reading’ of the book as a non-textual object offers a predictive argument for the aesthetic and cultural representation of heavier-than-air craft and pilots in the years immediately prior to the First World War. By viewing each section of the scrapbook as parts of a contingent whole, the early-twentieth century interest in performative masculinity (physical culture and boxing) becomes a part of the technological narrative of aviation development. In this paper I question the implications of branding an object such as this ‘irrelevant’ to the broader themes of the Penn-Gaskell collection, and offer some views of my own on how the notion of failure affects museological practices.