"Mark Twain Writes a Blank Book: The Story of Mark Twain's
Self-Pasting Scrap-Book Invention and Intellectual Property," talk,
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Humanities Institute,
Freiburg, Germany. May 18, 2015 from 11:15 AM to 12:45 PM.
FRIAS, Albertstr. 19, lecture hall.
The talk:
The iconic American author Mark Twain was an innovative thinker,
interested in new inventions. And like thousands of men and women 150
years ago, he grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks
-- the ancestors of Google and blogging. He brought those two
interests together by inventing, patenting, and manufacturing a
scrapbook that didn't need glue. He may have earned more money from
this wordless, blank book than from some of the books he wrote. This
talk explains the roots of his scrapbook invention in issues of
copyright and intellectual property -- his problems guarding his works
against free reprinting. His scrapbook let him take brilliant,
unexpected advantage of that proliferating reprinting. This talk also
sheds new light on how and why Samuel Clemens adopted the penname Mark
Twain. Mark Twain's innovative uses of scrapbooks was yet another way
he was ahead of his time.
Ellen Gruber Garvey is the author of /Writing with Scissors: American
Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
<http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Scissors-American-Scrapbooks-Renaissance/dp/0199927693/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418658012&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+with+scissors>
/and Professor of English at New Jersey City University, and Invited
Visiting Professor, Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Spring 2015.
--
Ellen Gruber Garvey, Ph.D.
Invited Visiting Professor, Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis,
Spring 2015
Professor, Department of English, New Jersey City University
Author, /Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War
to the Harlem Renaissance
<http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Scissors-American-Scrapbooks-Renaissance/dp/0199927693/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418658012&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+with+scissors>
/Visit the Scrapbook History website
<https://scrapbookhistory.wordpress.com/>
|
