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

Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War the Harlem Renaissance. By Ellen Gruber Garvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 304 pp. $99.00 cloth/$29.95 paper/From $14.57 e-book. Lori Merish, Georgetown University Scrapbooks today are generally associated with the corridors of Michaels craft stores and a heavily cliched, 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, example--to dislodge the from its disparaged status as a trivial, feminine artifact and 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 bookmaking groups marginalized from authorship and indeed could enable the production of vernacular histories. Garvey's method instantiates the expanded understanding of and production that the 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 is beautifully illustrated by a trove of fascinating images, from reproductions of broadsides, advertisements, and engraved illustrations cartoons. The 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 peoples reading, newspaper scrapbooks allowed readers save, manage, and reprocess information while open[ing] a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond their world with their own writing; such readers tell their own stories in books they wrote with (4). Garvey makes a compelling case that scrapbooking was a democratic practice: Because it used common, sometimes free materials, making was available people of all classes (II). If the print revolution shaped scrapbooking, scrapbooking left its mark on newspapers and periodicals, which came both accommodate and promote the passion scrapping. Indeed, many papers included regular columns for the scrapbook (qtd. in Garvey 7). Chapter i charts the intersection between scrapbooking, which was newly popular in the 185os, 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 readers' clipping and pasting (29). Since authors' names were often removed from clippings, writers devised ingenious ways facilitate authorial attribution; example, Twain cleverly attached his early newspaper items his byline by writing in first person about a character named Mark Twain. In highlighting such efforts and attending moments when literary texts reference or portray scrapbooking practices, Garvey reveals the explicit ways that scissorizing shaped literary culture. The only author merit chapter-length treatment, Twain stands out in Garvey's history several reasons: He used scrapbooking as an essential adjunct his writing, he invented a self-pasting as a way capitalize on the passion scissorizing, and he changed the very lexicon talking about scrapbooking (the OED takes three of four citations the verb to scrap book from Twain) (78, 86). …

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