Maurice Cramer was a Geneva schoolboy who joined his classmates in August 1870 for a school trip to discover Champéry.  It was common for such excursions to be recorded in some kind of journal and this one includes both text and drawings, even though it is believed the drawings were most likely done by the teacher leading the group, as Maurice would have been only about 7 at the time. 

Leave it to you to decide if he might nevertheless have been able to do the sketches you see here.  They have a playfulness about them which gives me hope he was the real artist. 

Hope it inspires you to keep alive the idea – and practice – of handwritten and hand-drawn journals.    

Source: Klara Tuszynski, ‘Un Voyage Scolaire en Zig-zag’, NotreHistoire.ch, October 2020

Image credit: La CRIÉE (Communauté de recherche interdisciplinaire sur l’éducation et l’enfance), Geneva