Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance by Ellen Gruber Garvey (review)

In her well-researched, highly original study of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American scrapbooks, Ellen Gruber Garvey reminds us of the revelatory capacity of what is often categorized as ephemera. Ubiquitous in post–Civil War America, scrapbooks today can be found collecting dust in attics, archives, libraries, flea markets, museums, and antiquarian bookstores. But, as Garvey’s study makes clear, when such objects fall into the hands of an insightful researcher asking perceptive questions, the scraps of a culture dealing with an overload of printed information take on new meanings. Garvey explains early on in the text that “tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of Americans made scrapbooks” (10). These collections of newspaper and magazine clippings, trade cards, photographs, and other “scraps” were put together by men, women, and children from a variety of social classes and backgrounds “for professional, domestic, educational, and political use and for many more reasons” (10). 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. Scrapbooks reveal what mattered to their authors, for they “open a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to their world with their own writing” (4).

Garvey’s work is divided into seven chapters that follow the progression and proliferation of scrapbooks in the nineteenth century as the penny press made news more popular and affordable to the masses. 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. For example, “If black people did not save white newspaper accounts of injustice towards African Americans, they might lose the chance to refer to events in the public record,” largely because they “could not count on continued access to the newspaper”; without scrapbooks as repositories of injustice, “the day’s history could vanish” (153). In her chapter on the scrapbooks of female activists and suffragettes, Garvey details the importance of the scrapbook for women forging new personal identities as they “document an extraordinary assertion of their selfhood and their claim to act in the public arena” (172). 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.

In our digital age overflowing with information, Garvey’s book is particularly timely. There are lessons to be learned from historic scrapbooks about organizing and processing information because they are the predecessors of “favorites lists, bookmarks, blogrolls, RSS feeds, and content aggregators” (4). Eminently readable and endlessly fascinating, social and cultural historians and literary scholars will find much to ponder in Writing with Scissors. Readers will find many helpful tips for decoding the mysteries of these curated clippings from the turn of the century, as well as many fine insights on our constantly changing relationship to news and information.