Is It a Diary, Commonplace Book, Scrapbook, or Whatchamacallit?: Six Years of Exploration in New England's Manuscript Archives

"Mixed material" items—"whatchamacallits"—appearing in manuscript collections of personal records pose special cataloging, access, and interpretive challenges for archivists and researchers alike. In this article we describe common genre and format transformations in different types of manuscripts we encountered during six years in archives while researching two books on literary culture among common folk in antebellum New England and then ponder the meanings of these transformations for archives. We advocate increased attention to these boundary-blurring items as points of future scholarly interest for the insights they can offer into broader patterns of cultural construction through life writing and its engagement and occasional experimentation with genre.