Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

by Ellen Gruber Garvey

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them.

In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives.

Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2012

About the author

I wrote Writing with Scissors to tell the story of the amazing scrapbooks ordinary people made from the newspapers they read. Writing The Adman in the Parlor taught me not to assume I knew how 19th century readers responded to their magazines. The scrapbooks I discuss in Writing with Scissors let me explore what readers did with their reading.

I have been a printer, a journalist, and an editor, and am now an English professor at New Jersey City University.

Reviews

[Acacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered Garvey's work on scrapbooks a few years ago when she stirred up controversy amongst contemporary "croppers." She had lamented the increasing homogeneity that came with late 20th and early 21st century "scrapbooking" where mass-produced letters, frames, stickers and the like were packed onto displays. Creativity and aesthetic perfection was simply a matter of shopping. The backlash came from crafters for whom cropping was more about relaxation and pleasure than the production of art.

Garvey then turned her interests toward earlier scrapbook production, using it as a way of amassing and organizing information, akin to the web-based system of bookmarks or apps like Evernote. In Writing With Scissors, Garvey examines how scrapbooking was adapted to the needs of the Civil War, abolition, and suffrage. They also transcended economic class with everything from used almanacs and ledger books to posh specially design scrapbooks like those patented by Mark Twain.

It's an interesting read, since it was an area of information collection and cultural production that I was unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, Dr. Gruber Garvey decided to end her study on the issues and problems with the preservation and archival access to the products of what seemed to be a hugely popular pastime, even when the compiler was famous. This ends the book on a depressing, and frankly tedious, note.

[Jennifer Robb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about how and why early scrapbooks came about and how Mark Twain developed a self-pasting scrapbook. I enjoyed the chapters where scrapbook examples were discussed as examples of what the author wanted to convey. When we got to the Civil War scrapbooks, I thought the tone changed a bit and it wasn't as enjoyable for me.

The subject matter was interesting, but the font was very small and it made it tedious to read.

[Amy]

In Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Ellen Gruber Garvey highlights the wealth of information that can be uncovered by carefully exploring one type of archival document in depth. Garvey’s thorough examination of hundreds of scrapbooks reveals not only the surprising and interesting purposes scrapbooks fulfilled for their makers, but also the ways in which personal scrapbooks were political statements important to a given community. Garvey discovers in scrapbooks historical evidence unavailable by other means, such as the African-American identity of a religious figure who publicly passed as white (158), and marginal notes by scrapbook creators that reveal the authorship of formerly anonymous newspaper pieces (191). Garvey’s accounts of scrapbooks are at times intensely gripping, as when she documents a woman’s 1870 attempt to hide her family’s recent slaveholding by pasting over a slave ledger (58-59). At other times, the narrative is enjoyably witty, as with Mark Twain’s advertisement for his patented scrapbook which he claimed would provide an impressive public service to the nation by reducing profanity from frustrated scrapbook makers (62-64).

Garvey proposes that the unique importance of scrapbooks as compared with other types of archived documents is their true democratic nature: “people who occupied positions far from political power or social authority” could create scrapbooks and “thereby enhance their own cultural authority” (209). Given this thesis, the heart of the book lies in the sections that cover scrapbook makers who were marginalized in American society at the time of their scrapbook creation. Chapter 4 on African-American scrapbooks demonstrates that black Americans had an urgent need to write history with scissors because the white press either ignored or condescended toward them. Later, Garvey makes the same point for women’s rights activists (197).

At the turn of the twentieth century when not enough books on black history were being published, scrapbook collections played an important role in the intellectual life of African American communities; contemporary readers could explore private museums and libraries containing encyclopedic scrapbooks (168). Scrapbooks made by African-Americans highlighted the unfolding history white people hid, misrepresented, or ignored. Utilizing the era’s abundant cheap newspapers, African-Americans compiled history on their own terms, with scrapbooks that celebrated the lives and achievements of ordinary blacks (162-3, 171). Garvey’s analysis of how scrapbook makers carefully documented the white press’ active promotion of lynching (150), dramatically underscores her theme of the important personal-as-political nature of scrapbooks (152-3). Garvey does not, however, discuss whether the African American scrapbooks contained any clipped newspaper accounts of the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to reveal what black readers thought of Twain’s book, thereby linking this chapter with her prior one on Mark Twain.

When faced with a finished scrapbook it can be difficult to decipher the order of assembly behind the finished product (21). Gleaning insight from archived scrapbooks, therefore, often requires a careful reading and additional research, which Garvey expertly executes. Unlike the modern scrapbooking hobby, which tends to focus on remembrances of an individual or familial past, the historical scrapbooks covered in Writing with Scissors were often used to store information the authors believed would help them in the future. For example, a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of home remedies for livestock ailments was made by a university graduate teaching in the East, who saved articles for the life she thought she might one day lead on a farm in the West (3).

Writing with Scissors is generously illustrated, reproducing the primary sources the author explores. Garvey exhibits a thorough engagement with recent historiography, and an appropriately heavy reliance on primary sources. Additionally, she intriguingly proposes that there are many connections between nineteenth century scrapbooks and modern ways of coping with an abundance of information in the digital age. In particular, Garvey sees a clear link between scrapbooks and today’s internet reader applications in which items are isolated from their original context to create “new knowledge” in another form (249, 251).

Not every chapter of the book is equally well-written. An early section on anonymity is dry and an overlong digression from scrapbooking. The chapter on women’s rights activists strays too far into a history of their activism, rather than staying grounded in their scrapbooks. Chapter 6 begins with redundancies from the introduction, and is stridently defensive of scrapbooks’ worthiness to be included in archives where, Garvey urges, they be kept in one piece as makers intended. This essay is strikingly out of place near the end of a book that ably proves how useful and interesting scrapbooks can be. Also the many pages on accession information belong in footnotes, as relevance to the themes of the book is not apparent. Quibbles with various sections aside, this interesting and engaging book is recommended.

[Laura Bang · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting look at the history of American scrapbooking and what the scrapbooks tell us about American history. As a special collections librarian, scrapbooks are some of my favorite artifacts in our collections because they tell the personal histories of ordinary people (and give a more ordinary perspective on more famous people). Garvey weaves all this history together well and I especially enjoyed the chapters on the subversive scrapbooking of African Americans and women's suffrage activists.

[Hapzydeco · Rating 3 out of 5]

A better visual presentation, i.e. color illustrations, accompanied by a larger font would have enhanced this book. Today’s digital world, e.g. Pinterest, could supplant scrapbooking.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I read this for a school project that is to write a review, I'll defer on too much comment right now, but it was incredibly fascinating to read about this particular aspect of american history. There's a discussion about the role of scrapbooks and newspapers in early american society, and then deeper examinations of scrapbooks made by people during the Civil War, African-Americans, and women's rights activists/suffragettes. I learned that Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook and how it was an early form of branding. The book wraps with discussion about scrapbooks in archives and as archival documents.

[Annie Rachele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book to read as we move into digital words... and away from paper... the thing itself.
Ellen Gruber Garvey brings us a new way to look at the U.S.A., the history of the printed word,
and asks a host of questions, we might never have considered.
An Insightful worthy read.
Give it to every newspaper lover, anyone who ever clipped an article from a newspaper,
and all those passionate for American history....

[Mills College Library]

745.5938 G2446 2013