Digitizing the Fitzgerald Family at the University of South Carolina

Not everyone finds themselves fresh out of college having one of their biggest dreams realized. However, I was lucky enough to find myself exactly in that position in August 2013 on my first day of work at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. I came to USC to earn a Master’s degree in library and information science and knew about many of the collections in the university libraries, but I never dreamed that I would be holding a first edition copy of The Great Gatsby in my hands less than a week after I began my program. A lifelong Fitzgerald fan and an English student, this truly was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life. As exciting as that day was for me, I was even more thrilled to discover that my projects during my first semester in graduate school would directly relate to F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this article, I will share my experiences and achievements in digitizing the Fitzgerald family’s photo albums and scrapbooks.

The Ernest F. Hollings Library is the newest library facility at the University of South Carolina, opened and dedicated to Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings in 2010. A state-of-the-art facility behind the Thomas Cooper Library, it is home to the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, South Carolina Political Collections, and Digital Collections. The Irvin Department is one of four special collections libraries at USC and collects mostly print materials and manuscripts. It houses over 150,000 volumes and fifty archival collections.

The University of South Carolina is home to the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose holdings now rival those at Princeton University for scholars interested in researching Fitzgerald and his contemporaries. The collection was formed by the late Dr. Bruccoli and his wife and grew over the course of five decades of collecting and research. In addition to his scholarly and teaching interest in Fitzgerald and his work as an author, editor, publisher, and collector, Dr. Bruccoli was a friend of Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. Some of the highlights of the collection include unrevised galley proofs for Trimalchio, writings and artwork by Zelda, the flask that Zelda gave F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1918, the Warner Turner Entertainment collection of screenplays, and Fitzgerald’s personal ledger. The library continues to add to the collection annually; one of its recent acquisitions was the “The End of Hate” archive, a group of three early versions of Fitzgerald’s story that was published in the 22 June 1940 issue of Collier’s.

A lesser-known treasure of the Bruccoli collection is an array of photographs and scrapbooks compiled by the Fitzgerald family, principally Zelda. There are several photo albums and scrapbooks in the collection, but unfortunately they are rarely consulted or studied by researchers. My first major project as a graduate assistant in the Irvin Department was to work with these photographs in preparation for the Twelfth Biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Montgomery in November 2013. Some of the photographs were in need of significant repair, while others only required some colorization adjustments. Each image presented unique challenges, and with the help of the Digital Collections staff and Photoshop, I was able to restore some of the most damaged images to a point at which they could be seen without obstruction.

There were three photographs in particular that were especially difficult to repair. The first shows F. Scott Fitzgerald holding a copy of This Side of Paradise shortly after its publication (fig. 1). The primary issue with this photo was that it had several stains and some discoloration from aging and wear and tear. The stains on this photo were mostly opaque and in places that made them difficult to remove, like through his trousers, between two fence posts, or on parts of his right hand. I knew my approach to removing these would have to be somewhat creative. To remove some of the stains, I was able to use the clone stamp tool in Photoshop...