Contents:
Ubiquitous in post—Civil War America, scrapbooks today can be found collecting dust in attics, archives, libraries, flea markets, museums, and antiquarian bookstores. They are especially useful sources, Garvey argues, for scholars trying to recapture the daily lives of those who did not own the presses or media outlets—particularly women and African Americans.
Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance [Ellen Gruber Garvey] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance.
With the onslaught of print media, scrapbooks gave people the power to organize, reflect upon, and process the news relevant to their lives and families, and to re-circulate this news in their own networks of association. Chapters on the importance of scrapbooks during and after the Civil War, as a means of mourning, and the alternative histories to be discovered in African American scrapbooks are particularly insightful.
Scrapbooks served multiple purposes to their creators and their creation could be both dangerous and politically subversive.
In a very real sense, these scrapbooks merged the domestic and public spheres of women trying to find and create new roles in both arenas. Eminently readable and endlessly fascinating, social and cultural historians and literary scholars will find much to ponder in Writing with Scissors. Ellen Garvey shows us how nineteenth and early twentieth century readers became writers as they recycled and repurposed scraps from various sources to create secret, unwritten histories that often worked against the grain of accepted official narratives of the times.
Peterson, author of Black Gotham: Fragile containers of personal memory and public reflection, they're potent--if ephemeral--receptacles of social history.
To decode such volumes requires a curious mind, a steady compass, and a generous heart--qualities Garvey possesses in abundant supply. Drawing on an exquisite trove of original research, Garvey explains how earlier generations of Americans thrived amid an unprecedented onrush of information, tailoring media to individual ends and expressing--and making--themselves in the process.
Writing with Scissors is the perfect prequel to Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture , one part celebration of the grassroots and one part history of the ways that people consume the media they do. Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Writing With Scissors makes a huge contribution to scrapbook studies, and I imagine it will be a jumping off point for many further projects. Let's run with it. Writing with Scissors shows us a way to glimpse their personal thoughts on their contemporary lives and times.
In a way, it brings them back to life as human beings acting in their world. Should appeal to a broad range of readers interested in visual culture and theories of communication--especially because of Garvey's judicious comparisons to contemporary digital strategies of engaging text Writing with Scissors adds invaluable material to a growing and significant body of research, and it also brings in theories about the connection between making scrapbooks and managing today's profusion of digital information.
Writing with Scissors is a richly imagined, original contribution to our understanding of periodical literature, book history, and the history of authorship and reading practices. It was unsurprisingly started by an album company. Scrapbook making is hugely popular and profitable.
Stores that sell scrapbooking supplies use the day to sponsor scrapping gatherings or crops where scrapbookers -- nearly all women -- get together to spread their projects out at tables with equipment for diecutting, embossing, distressing paper to make it look old, and sharing tips about layout and technique as they paste family pictures and memorabilia into their scrapbooks.
Many of his early newspaper writings were preserved this way and came in handy when he gathered up his Quaker City letters when constructing the text for The Innocents Abroad.
He also consulted his scrapbook when writing Roughing It. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain created perhaps the most famous fictional scrapbook in American literature, containing the morbid clippings of Emmeline Grangerford--so admired by Huck Finn. Twain used scrapbooks himself and understood how they functioned in American society. But scrapbooking was a slow and messy business, and always involved a glue pot and brushes, damp pages, long waits for glue to dry, stuck pages, and spilled glue.
The branding Mark Twain had used to market his own writings extended to his self-pasting scrapbook when it was introduced into the market in it had been patented in , and he took advantage of the newspaper exchange to spread the word of his invention. The librarians filled a Mark Twain scrapbook with clippings about boys inspired to lives of crime by their reading choices, and using the implied authority of Mark Twain's name, made miscreants read those clippings enshrined in a volume bearing none other than Mark Twain's name on the cover. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. The subject matter was interesting, but the font was very small and it made it tedious to read. Rachel rated it really liked it Jul 09, I first encountered Garvey's work on scrapbooks a few years ago when she stirred up controversy amongst contemporary "croppers.
Commercial blank books could be used, but more often any old out-of-date ledger would do. Often a scrapbook began life as a patent office report or an agricultural report. The branding Mark Twain had used to market his own writings extended to his self-pasting scrapbook when it was introduced into the market in it had been patented in , and he took advantage of the newspaper exchange to spread the word of his invention. In a shrewd ploy, he wrote a comical letter to Dan Slote, his scrapbook publisher and business partner, and counted on newspaper editors to circulate this letter through the newspaper exchange in the form of free advertising--and they did.
In advertising leaflets there were illustrations of scrapbooking "before" and "after" the introduction of the Mark Twain Self-pasting Scrapbook. The "before" image shows an angry disheveled scrapbooker surrounded by spilt glue, a frightened cat and wife and child, spewing lightning bolts of profanity as he flings his old-fashioned scrapbook through the air; the "after" image shows a genteel Victorian family enjoying their Mark Twain scrapbooks in the tranquility of their perfectly appointed parlor.
Although the format of the Mark Twain Scrapbook scripted how an owner would have to arrange their scrapbook--the self-pasting pages had the glue printed on each page in columns that required the scraps to be arranged like columns of text--the convenience was appreciated and sales were brisk.
Fortunately for Twain, patent law protected Twain's invention better than copyrights protected his writings, and his trademarked name, of no use in protecting the copyrights of his writings, could be used to protect a vendible product like his scrapbook. Not too long after it entered the market, Twain's own patented self-pasting scrapbook found its way into a work of fiction as a prop when an Irish servant is given one as a Christmas gift in an novel by Mary Rand.