I'm writing to thank the members of this list for your help answering 
queries for my new book, */Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks 
from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance/*, now out from Oxford 
University Press. As I told an interviewer on NPR, Mark Twain had his 
fingers all over scrapbooks. The book thoroughly explores how and why he 
invented and promoted the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrap Book via the 
19th century version of viral marketing. His own story of a meme gone 
wild, "Punch, Brothers, Punch," also known as "A Literary Nightmare," 
enters into this mix. I have uncovered as well the story of Twain's 
first purported biographer, Will M. Clemens, whom Twain called "a mere 
maggot." The many illustrations include some of the delightfully comic 
scrapbook covers.

Here's some more information on the book --

Before Facebook, before blogs, before Pinterest, and before newspaper 
databases, there were scrapbooks. Nineteenth-century scrapbook makers 
collected and sorted information to document events and critique press 
accounts, thereby shaping an alternative media and creating their own 
democratic archives. They shared their work with family, friends, and 
community.

Ordinary and extraordinary Americans created scrapbooks out of newspaper 
clippings -- from farmers and janitors to Abraham Lincoln, from 
Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, from abolitionists to Confederates.

Like us, they felt overloaded with information -- theirs coming from 
cheap, plentiful newspapers. They clipped and pasted to create their own 
meanings from newspaper poetry, stories, and articles. African Americans 
created new histories out of the hostile white press. Suffragists spoke 
back to the press they did not control.

Their scrapbooks now serve as unique historical records of Americans' 
personal, passionate, and often critical relationship with the media, 
and of living through momentous times.

These were not the family-centered scrapbooks that engage many domestic 
crafters today. Rather, by cutting out and pasting down what they read 
into blank books, old textbooks, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark 
Twain invented, people claimed ownership of their reading.

             You can see a sample of it in a short article I wrote for 
the /New York Times /Disunion blog: "Scrapbooking the Civil War": 
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/scrapbooking-the-civil-war/

For more information and to order, please see Oxford University Press 
<http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/AmericanLiterature/19thC/?view=usa&ci=9780199927692>, 
bn.com 
<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/writing-with-scissors-ellen-gruber-garvey/1111010809?ean=9780199927692&amp;itm=1&amp;usri=9780199927692>, 
Amazon.com 
<http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Scissors-American-Scrapbooks-Renaissance/dp/0199927693/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1351711727&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=9780199927692%3E%20,>, 
or your local bookstore.

Thanks for taking a look at */Writing with Scissors/*/. /I look forward 
to hearing what you think of it.

Warm regards,

Ellen

Ellen Gruber Garvey,
Professor, Department of English, New Jersey City University
Author, /Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War 
to the Harl 
<http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/?view=usa&ci=9780199927692>//em 
Renaissance 
<http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/?view=usa&ci=9780199927692>/
Visit the Scrapbook History website <http://scrapbookhistory.wordpress.com/>
Like /Writing with Scissors /on Facebook 
<https://www.facebook.com/WritingWithScissors>


<file:///C:/Users/Ellen/Pictures/blog%20pix/blog%20pix/>

cover

*
A few advance comments: *

“/Writing with Scissors/ transports us beyond the well-known world of 
books, newspapers, and magazines, of internet websites, blogs, and 
databases into a bygone world of texts created with scissors and 
glue. Ellen Garvey shows us how nineteenth and early twentieth century 
readers became writers as they recycled and repurposed scraps … to 
create secret, unwritten histories that often worked against the grain 
of accepted official narratives of the times.” —Carla L. Peterson, 
author of /Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in 
Nineteenth-Century New York City/


“American scrapbooks may just be our most precious time capsules. 
Fragile containers of personal memory and public reflection, they’re 
potent—if ephemeral—receptacles of social history. To decode such 
volumes requires a curious mind, a steady compass, and a generous 
heart—qualities Garvey possesses in abundant supply. An extraordinary 
book.”—Jessica Helfand, author of /Scrapbooks: An American History /

/ /

“/Writing with Scissors/ is cutting-edge! Drawing on an exquisite trove 
of original research, Garvey explains how earlier generations of 
Americans thrived amid an unprecedented onrush of information, tailoring 
media to individual ends and expressing—and making—themselves in the 
process. /Writing with Scissors /is the perfect prequel to Henry 
Jenkins’s /Convergence Culture/, one part celebration of the grassroots 
and one part history of the ways that people consume the media they 
do.”—Lisa Gitelman, author of /Always Already New: Media, History, and 
the Data of Culture/