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

Scrapbooks today are generally associated with the corridors of Michaels craft stores and a heavily clichéd, nostalgic performance of domestic femininity. Garvey's richly detailed, innovative study joins a small number of recent scholarly efforts—the edited collection The Scrapbook in American Life, for example—to dislodge the scrapbook from its disparaged status as a "trivial," "feminine" artifact and to reclaim it as a historically important form and object of cultural analysis. Garvey reveals that in the nineteenth century both men (including Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln) and women made scrapbooks, and she argues that scrapbooking could be a politically meaningful, empowering act. In the narrative Garvey constructs, scrapbooks provided access to bookmaking for groups marginalized from authorship and indeed could enable the production of vernacular histories. Garvey's method instantiates the expanded understanding of "literary" culture and production that the book tracks; chapters encompass critical readings of scrapbooks Garvey has located in archives as well as deft analyses of literary texts—many of which appeared in periodicals—in which scrapbooks and "scissorizing" are portrayed. The book is beautifully illustrated by a trove of fascinating images, from reproductions of broadsides, advertisements, and engraved illustrations to cartoons.

The scrapbook form, Garvey demonstrates in the introduction, emerged out of the commonplace book, but what distinguishes scrapbooks is their inextricability from the newspaper and print revolution of the early nineteenth century and its proliferation of cheap, disposable printed material. In an era when such material constituted the bulk of many people's reading, newspaper scrapbooks allowed readers to save, manage, and reprocess information while "open[ing] a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to their world with their own writing"; such readers "tell their own stories in books they wrote with scissors" (4). Garvey makes a compelling case that scrapbooking was a democratic practice: "Because it used common, sometimes free materials, scrapbook making was available to people of all classes" (11). If the print revolution shaped scrapbooking, scrapbooking left its mark on newspapers and periodicals, which came to both accommodate and promote the passion for scrapping. Indeed, many papers included regular columns "for the scrapbook" (qtd. in Garvey 7).

Chapter 1 charts the intersection between scrapbooking, which was newly popular in the 1850s, and what Meredith McGill calls the "culture of reprinting" (qtd. in Garvey 30); both "endorsed an ideal of reuse and recirculation" (36). Newspapers and magazines regularly published one another's materials, often without crediting the source. So common was the practice that editors were sometimes called "scissors swingers," and the textual morsels they published were ideal for readers' clipping and pasting (29). Since authors' names were often removed from clippings, writers devised ingenious ways to facilitate authorial attribution; for example, Twain cleverly attached his early newspaper items to his byline by writing in first person about a character named Mark Twain. In highlighting such efforts and attending to moments when literary texts reference or portray scrapbooking practices, Garvey reveals the explicit ways that "scissorizing" shaped literary culture.

The only author to merit chapter-length treatment, Twain stands out in Garvey's history for several reasons: He used scrapbooking as an "essential adjunct" to his writing, he invented a self-pasting scrapbook as a way to capitalize on the passion for scissorizing, and he changed the very lexicon for talking about scrapbooking (the OED takes three of four citations for the verb "to scrap book" from Twain) (78, 86). Capitalizing on and extending Twain's popularity, "Mark Twain's Patented Self-Pasting Scrapbook" could facilitate the nineteenth-century fantasy of a confiding intimacy with the author—a way to "get at the author," in Barbara Hochman's words. Beginning with Emmeline Grangerford's scrapbook, a satiric object in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Garvey surveys how writers used scrapbooks to collect and track their...