An Interview with Ellen Gruber Garvey
Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2012.
“Walt Whitman says this amazing thing. He hands a scrap of paper with a bit of poetry he likes on it to a kid, and he says, ‘Save this. It’s a bit for you to understand by and by. Put it in your scrapbook and you can read it later when you know how to read.’ What a vision of the many uses of scrapbooks through a lifetime! “
Ellen Gruber Garvey is the author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, the first sustained and scholarly exploration of scrapbooks in American popular and print culture. Garvey’s 2012 book tells the story of the amazing scrapbooks ordinary people made from the newspapers they read. It continues to impact the field of nineteenth-century studies, offering fundamental insights into the practice that allowed Americans “to make a place for themselves and their communities by finding, sifting, analyzing, and recirculating writing that mattered to them” (4) — from Mark Twain, to activist American women, to African Americans. Garvey’s work examines the relationships between the personal and the public that characterized much of this process, as well as what scrapbooks reveal about the ways people responded to what they read.
Kacie Wills and Olivia Loksing Moy had the pleasure of speaking with Garvey about scrapbooks and commonplace books, inviting the author to reflect on K-SAA’s 2023-2024 Public Outreach theme of commonplacing.
On scrapbooks and the research process:
Kacie Wills: What interested you in these scrapbooks and commonplace books as an area to do so much research? I have my copy of Writing with Scissors here. I think I mentioned in my email it was the first book I ever read on scrapbooking, which is something I sort of fell into while working on my dissertation and which became something I'm endlessly fascinated with now. So, how did you come into this area of research?
Ellen Gruber Garvey: Well, I toppled into it from a totally different direction. My dissertation, which became my first book, which is called The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s, starts with the whole question of how magazines became dependent on advertising in the 1890s in the U.S. I wanted to figure out: how did readers learn to engage with advertising? I was interested in advertising trade cards that were given out free by advertisers. Children collected them, and I discovered that they made scrapbooks out of them. I realized that I was looking at how they arranged them on the page, at how these children had played with them: what they did, how they made the cards talk to each other, the kinds of groupings they made of them. I discovered various common themes, pretty lady or flower groupings or groupings of cards insulting adults. Sometimes, these are “all things I want in my life” kinds of groupings. I started reading nineteenth century advice and commentary about making scrapbooks, and tried to ground my assertions in some evidence. Reading pictures where nobody has annotated anything is more complicated, but sometimes they do annotate and then you say, “Oh, okay, now I have, not quite a Rosetta Stone, but something of a key to other pages.”
A more general research interest of mine is in what people do with what they read. How do they make use of it? How do they make sense of it? That could be reception theory, reader response, but it's sort of a larger way of understanding, not how they read a particular text necessarily, but what larger uses they made of them. And, the scrapbooks are one way of seeing that.
I mentioned my interest in these trade card scrapbooks to a friend, and visited a used bookstore with him. He introduced me to the proprietor, a former English professor. She brought out something I’d never seen before. It was a book of Puritan sermons, and inside it were pasted stories, covering over the sermons. The first story was one I knew quite well. It was Mary Wilkins Freeman’s, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’,” in which the mother of the title has been living in a squalid house since her marriage, and her husband keeps promising to make her a new house. But he doesn't. Her daughter is about to be married, and she'll be living with them. The husband goes off to buy some more cows, as he's already put up a brand new, very sparkly barn. When he is away getting the cows, she moves the whole family into the new barn because it's much better than her house. It doesn't have cows in it yet. And, he's shocked when he comes back.
What I realized was what the scrapbook maker was doing – like the story’s protagonist – was moving her clippings into a nice new house. She took her clippings–they were not from books; they were from newspapers because all of these stories were reprinted or originally printed in newspapers. She took this very nicely bound book of sermons, and she said, “Okay, let's put them in there.” And so she had a book that looks lovely on the bookshelf, and it had a nice binding, and she made what she needed for herself from it.
So, that just knocked me over. That's when I started looking more at newspaper clipping scrapbooks and wanted to know more about what was going on with them.
On scrapbooks and reading:
EGG: Scrapbooks are a way of making things saveable. Because you end up pasting things down, you're organizing them, and then you're saving the order. So, you're saving evidence of reading. You're saving evidence of what it meant to you. Very occasionally they are annotated, and that's incredibly revealing and wonderful too.
I went to the University of Pennsylvania for my doctorate, principally because Janice Radway was teaching there. I was completely smitten with her book, Reading the Romance, not because I read romances, but because it was a model for how to use people's responses to their reading in a believable, ethical way, in a way that paid attention to who they were and what it meant to them. It was a model for thinking about engaging with reading that was different from the kind of New Critical approach I had been coming up in and also the newer models of deconstruction and so forth, which were really elaborations of New Criticism. My dissertation on magazines was really also about: How were people reading these magazines and how do you find evidence of it? Most of them didn't publish letters to the editor, so how do you decide anything about what readers thought of it, with these historical materials? That was one of my angles, and then the scrapbook seemed like an astonishing illumination of that, limited but astonishing.
On the relationship of commonplacing to originality:
EGG: It's a curious thing that the nineteenth century in the U.S. is so much a time of reuse. It's earlier as well, of course, but what's striking to researchers is how little value was placed on originality. The press is so taken up with reprinting. And, it's before anything like Associated Press or other ways of getting the news around. So, the easiest thing was not to have one central place distributing all, but rather for an editor to pick it up from their favorites. Newspapers are a really striking example of how distribution and distributed information was valued over originality. We think of the Romantics as being [associated with] originality first, but here originality is unimportant – it’s even worse.
Scrapbooks and interpretation:
EGG: You don't know what scrapbook makers are thinking. There are numerous examples of scrapbooks that really are misleading in terms of what their readers were thinking. There's famously a collection at Emory where somebody's collected what might seem like jingoistic articles about the Spanish American War, but they're actually collected by an anti-war, anti-imperialist founder of the Niagara Movement. There are [also] lynching scrapbooks that are pro-lynching and anti-lynching, but some of them are saving the same articles, whether to relish them or to bear witness.
Olivia Loksing Moy: Yes, that's so interesting. I'm a member of the Grolier Club in New York City, where book collectors convene and present their collections and the history of their personal collecting process. I was part of an event where Frank Wu, who was just newly minted as the president of Queens College came and presented a collection of basically anti-Asian racist propaganda. Everyone was shocked, but he explained exactly what you did: that it's important to collect and amass all of these ephemera that seem minor, or which appear as negligible microaggressions that might otherwise be lost to history, and bring them into a center and historically catalog it to say, “This happened. Confront it in all of its material iterations.”
EGG: In the African American scrapbooks, like in one case in William Henry Dorsey’s scrapbook, he also includes times when people fought back, or won a law case against lynching, or prevented lynching from taking place. In another one at the Huntington Library, Charles Turner, an African American in Missouri, intersperses articles about lynching with invitations to musicales and dance performances. Is he just working chronologically? Or, is he saying that all of these are part of life, that this is what we're living with?
That also points to why it's important to know who made the collection. If you have a bunch of racist, anti-Asian clippings in one book, well, it could just be some really nasty anti-Asian guy, or it could be that they are collecting to witness, collecting to have evidence. And, that's why it's so important to know something about the people who made a scrapbook, though typically people do not write their names in the fronts of scrapbooks.
William Henry Dorsey, 1903 (from Colored American magazine)
On a personal favorite scrapbook:
KW: Do you have a favorite scrapbook or commonplace book that you've worked with in your research, and why?
EGG: Of course. I was absolutely fascinated by William Henry Dorsey's scrapbooks. He made something like 400 scrapbooks, all different sized books for various reasons. [He was] an African-American son of an enslaved man who ran away and became prosperous in Philadelphia. Dorsey was a painter, and collected art and other things, and he was very interested in African and African-American history.
One of his scrapbooks, “Colored Centenarians,” I wrote about in Writing with Scissors. He clipped every article he could find for about 40 years about Black people who died over the age of a hundred. Whether they were actually over the age of a hundred or not he didn't care. Neither did the newspaper writers, because the whole reason to write about the person was they had reached this extraordinary age. They claimed roots in the country. They asserted, for instance, “I helped George Washington's forces escape,” or, “I fed them when my enslaver wouldn't give them food.”
They're also horrendously ironic. One enslaved woman was held on one of the British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Then, when the country got its freedom, of course she was enslaved again. So, she was released from the prison ship back into slavery. The article doesn't make a point of that, but because Dorsey puts them all together in this way, you see his point.
There are a couple also where he has the same person being talked about, but in totally different ways by different newspapers. He probably knew who wrote the piece in the Philadelphia paper that was much more admiring and excited about the person and really honored them. Most articles were unsigned, but he would have known his world, and who wrote which.
What is Dorsey doing? He is writing a history of Black America through these figures. He's also showing something about what's going on in the newspapers as he's doing it. And he's creating a family history. This scrapbook starts off with an obituary clipping about a centenarian who saw an important Revolutionary War event. It's just a 3-line clipping, but he draws a circle around it and puts it by itself on the very front page of this scrapbook. He writes, “The above was my great grandmother on my mother's side,” and he doesn't do that about family anywhere else, as far as I saw. It's not a personal scrapbook. It's not about his family. It's not a memory. He doesn't put that at the head of a whole lot of other stuff about births and weddings in the family. He puts it at the head of a whole long line of “Colored Centenarians,” as he calls them. So,that one was wonderful.
There's another one that was very intriguing, partly because the only reason I understood what was going on was because I found out something about the person who made it, Elizabeth Farnham May. Now, there are a lot of Civil War scrapbooks where people saved verses from the newspaper about mourning and death. They were losing people right and left. They were all in some degree of mourning. And, poetry expressing grief struck them, so many of them saved and clipped those poems from the newspaper.
Most newspapers published some poetry. They probably used it to some degree as column filler to make the columns come out even, but it's more than that because they're often at the top of the page in an honored space.
May made this scrapbook 10 years after the Civil War. Her mother had collected the clippings during the Civil War, and after she had lost a baby. So, she's in personal mourning and she's also collecting the mourning of the country. A lot of people intersected this larger, national grief with personal grief.
Elizabeth, 10 years after the mother died, takes her mother’s clipping collection and makes her own scrapbook out of it. Her father at that point is ill, and I think dies somewhere in the middle of this pasting. The reason I know the scrapbook was not made by her mother is because the kind of scrapbook she used wasn't invented till later.
So, that's just the layeredness of it, that she's thinking of her own grief through her mother's grief, through these bits of poetry. I'm not making assessments about the poetry generally, some of it's pretty maudlin, but it expressed something for her.
One of my scrapbook makers was Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a Boston abolitionist doctor. His son died during the Civil War and he went to the encampment and got his son's body, which was really unusual. And he made a beautiful, formal scrapbook more than 10 years later, expressing the grief that he felt with poems he collected during the war. He annotates it to some degree. He writes an introduction, where he says “these are the poems that moved me when all of our hearts were touched and moved during the war.” And, much of the poetry is pretty bad, but you know, they still moved us, and so I'm saving them here. It speaks to that effect that if you're in mourning, sentiments often do speak to you and it's not about the exaltedness of the poetry. It's about just hearing something speaking to that sensation, that sentiment.
On the differences between American and British scrapbooks:
OLM: “Do you think that there was anything particularly American, or some American style markedly different from scrapbooking in other parts of the world or Britain?”
EGG: I have seen work by English scrapbook makers like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, with cartoons and jokes from the 1850s to the 70s. Others were later. Virginia Woolf kept a scrapbook, a clipping book which she used towards writing. This was a way of amassing materials that crossed national boundaries. From references to such works, I think that was probably common for other writers too.
Scrapbooks were an extremely democratic practice [where] you could take old books and paste materials down.
Scrapbooks and handling information overload:
OLM: In the description of the book and in your chapters, you talk about scrapbooking as a way of parsing through or making sense of information overload, at a time with so much circulation in the news. Several years have passed since the book came out, and I'm wondering if, in a digital context today, you see instances of people, especially young people, trying to electronically scrapbook to make sense of digital overload. Especially with new technology advances where people are splicing problematically, not citing, or decontextualizing things, have you been seeing more and more of these connections?
EGG: Pinterest posts are very much that kind of curating–I'm sorry to use that overused word. The bringing together of materials by somebody–but they're mostly outward facing. They collect stuff, and they keep it together, and then they have no idea where it came from. They should be able to trace it quite easily, but many reusers use sources that deliberately obscure that because of copyright issues. They remove the breadcrumb trail, or they make it impossible to figure out where something came from. It's worse now; people seem to have given up on figuring it out. ChatGPT makes it completely impossible to trace your way back.
It's not that different from clipping off the source information from the newspaper clipping, which people did all the time in nineteenth century scrapbooks. Though there I think they wanted to make it look more book-like. When they were pasting down their columns, many didn't want to keep the references. When they trimmed that off, they were saying, “This is going to be a book, not not a bunch of newspaper clippings.
On commonplacing and the classroom:
OLM: Over the course of this past year, a handful of us have been teaching using commonplace books in the classroom, whether it's a Romantic lit course or some other literature or composition class. And, we found 2 very interesting things. One is that students are actually quite burnt out from all the tech overload and they really appreciate the tactile analog. So, there was a whole mental wellness component that we had not anticipated, that the students were saying they find a respite in this kind of work. The other thing was very amazing. It speaks to your question about originality – which is such an American, self-made vision – that we want these brand new theses in each of our papers. I had just come out of sabbatical and during that year Chat GPT emerged and everyone was buzzing about plagiarism. I didn't even realize, but when I came back to teach and the assignments were really based on commonplace book entries week by week and reorganizing your entries and then formulating it, making your own anthology, it was a wonderful antidote to that problem.
EGG: Yes, I know many people who've used commonplacing in the classroom. I did that in the last few years I was teaching. (I'm retired now.) It was a really good assignment. I think I made it optional. Those who did it really appreciated it because it gave them a set of notes of what they what they drew from the reading, what they chose. And it wasn't for any obvious purpose; it was just what they liked, or what struck them. In fact, it helped them develop important ways of paying attention to their reading, but they had a whole different orientation to it.
OLM: Yes, there’s something very, well, democratic, equalizing, bringing students to different special collections and libraries like the Morgan and the Pforzheimer Collection at the NYPL. Students are studying and writing papers about all of these unpublished works by, really often, young women writers or young girls. And getting to think about these people as authors, a Romantic era author, that's another kind of balancing act that commonplacing does for us as a society.
KW: I think it works especially well in the classroom right now when students are so used to reaching goals and checking boxes to get through their education. This way of connecting to the literature and not viewing it as a course they need to take or a box they need to check but something that can have personal resonance. One of my professors in graduate school used to call his literature classes “building your literary autobiography.” That was the approach to the survey: how can you build an autobiography for yourself of these texts that you read, and I think commonplacing and teaching that in the classroom is really one way to do that. Regardless of their major, they [students] leave your class with this wonderful list of texts that meant something to them, that they can return to, throughout their life. I think that's just such a unique thing literary studies in English can offer that other classes just really can’t. I think it's our way of keeping our place in higher education as things shift more and more towards being career oriented and degree oriented.
EGG: Getting away from the instrumentalist vision of reading – that it's for some specific purpose. You can help give students tools for engaging with literature that takes it out of the box-checking, that takes it out of the “this is all for a purpose” mindset.
On the intersection between commonplace books and scrapbooks:
EGG: It’s easy to think of scrapbooks as a kind of industrialized form of commonplace, that you're cutting out big swaths instead of copying out little bits, although some commonplace books have long, hand copied pieces, as I'm sure you know. And, scrapbooks allow more inclusiveness. Scrapbooks also allow one to save without reading, which I think a commonplace book does not, so there's saving it for a future self to read it later: “Here's this interesting article. Let me get to it later,” which I think is very much our practice often now, reading in terms of putting something aside or sending it to oneself.
I wouldn't say that commonplacing is the superior handcrafted form of scrapbook making. And, by the way, I don't use the term “scrapbooking.” Nobody uses it in the nineteenth century. They might say ‘scrapping,’ but they would more often say, “making a scrapbook.”
But, commonplacing has more the sense of reuse to create other writing. And that is one idea of the “common place”: that everybody writes from the same quote. The scrapbook, not so much.
Some commonplace and scrapbooks run from one to another. They start out as a commonplace book, and then the clippings start displacing the handwritten pieces. This isn't quite the same thing, but I was very much struck by a multi-volume diary in the New York Historical Society collection of Edward Neufville Tailer, Jr., who was a New York businessman during the Civil War. He kept a voluminous diary about his interactions with people, social and political, but then the Civil War started, and it just was too much to keep up with, so he started pasting down clippings instead with fewer and fewer bits of writing. It's that same idea of too much. Handwriting was not enough. He starts before the war with regular sized volumes, but they swell and bulge as the war goes on because he's got all these clippings in them; you can see that shift dramatically.
Both for scrapbooks and commonplacing, there's the idea that children, students, anybody learns good taste by learning how to select. Copying or cutting and pasting are ways of choosing, of demonstrating your good taste in choosing. How you arrange it is not so important in this understanding. But your taste in choosing and deciding is worth saving. And, as you said, making, building your literary autobiography that way. And, people do speak of how personal and intimate their scrapbooks are, and they don't want somebody else to see them because it shows who they are, and they might not want to share that.
On scrapbooks, commonplace books and literacy or literariness:
OLM: Of scrapbooks and commonplace books, do you consider one more of a sentimental genre than the other?
EGG: I don't consider one more sentimental than the other; it totally depends on content. In fact, the scrapbook might be more sentimental because it has the option of also saving the connection to how you first read it, the physicalness of the clipping–”I read about the war,” “I read about this death in the newspaper, and here's the clipping”-- which is very much the way people continue to save newspapers today.
After 9/11 in New York, many, many people saved the whole paper. “Here's this thing I lived through.” Or, Obama's first election, people went rushing out to buy the paper one, though they were mostly no longer buying paper newspapers. And, you would think that a commonplace book might be more sentimental in that way, more connected to emotion and memory, hand copying the work, but I don't think so.
OLM: If you were to take commonplace books and scrapbooks, and compare the 2 in terms of literacy or literariness, does one rise above the other?
EGG: The scrapbook is strongly associated with literacy. It was part of teacher training, to learn to make scrapbooks because you're going to get sent off to the hinterlands.
“Here, bring a book with you with all the good poetry that you've been learning and some music maybe (because some magazines published music) and some useful pictures, and you'll have that as part of your teaching." That was very literary and very deliberate. Teachers also had pupils making scrapbooks.
Aside from school, there is that sense that kids are making scrapbooks, and they're putting the poems in upside down. They don't know what they're looking at. I mean, they like the pictures. And, later they would look at it and gather the bouquets of wisdom they had stored up.
Along those lines, Walt Whitman says this amazing thing. He hands a scrap of paper with a bit of poetry he likes on it to a kid, and he says, “Save this. It’s a bit for you to understand by and by. Put it in your scrapbook and you can read it later when you know how to read.” What a vision of the many uses of scrapbooks through a lifetime.
Ellen Gruber Garvey is the author of two prize-winning books, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (Oxford U P), and Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford UP, 2013). She has written for CNN, The Washington Post, New York Times Disunion blog, Slate, The Forward, and The Root. She recently retired as Professor of English at New Jersey City University. She serves on the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.