_Writing With Scissors, American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem
Renaissance_. By Ellen Gruber Garvey. Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp.
304. Softcover. $29.95 . ISBN 978-0199927692.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac Donnell.

Copyright (c) 2013 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

Mark Twain, Willa Cather's aunt, a White House aide to President James A.
Garfield, Charles Reade, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Charles Sumner,
Emmeline Grangerford, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, and countless others
all shared a passion--scrap-booking. But only Mark Twain dreamed up an
improvement to the scrapbook, patented it, and then used his carefully honed
brand name to promote it. Despite being Twain's most successful invention
and one of his few profitable business ventures, the Mark Twain Scrapbook
has never been treated at such length and in context within the history of
American scrapbooking until this extremely informative study by Ellen
Garvey, which focuses on the Mark Twain Scrapbook in the second of seven
chapters.

Garvey traces the pastime of scrapbooking to its origins in the commonplace
book, personal diary, and friendship albums. Although the Oxford English
Dictionary credits Twain with using "scrapbook" as a verb, she finds several
earlier usages, and describes who kept scrapbooks and why. Some were records
of lives lived (African Americans), and others were used to prepare for
lives to come (Willa Cather's aunt, who dreamed of a married life out west
and gathered materials in anticipation of that life to come). Charles Sumner
waved his own scrapbook during a speech on the floor of Congress to bolster
his arguments, and a White House aide actually used a Mark Twain Scrapbook
to preserve daily reports of Garfield's recovery from an assassination
attempt--an exercise that did not have a happy ending. Scrapbooking was
often a social activity (as pictured in some ads for the Mark Twain
Scrapbook) and had a social value perfectly analogous to quilting bees.
Garvey enumerates the variety of content found in scrapbooks--clippings,
cards, photos, invitations, letters, programs, stamps, hair, etc., and makes
the observation that the "cut and paste" methodology used in old scrapbooks
has endured down to the present day as a computer icon.

Newspapers of the early nineteenth century included special sections for
scrapbookers, and newspaper editors, also known as "scissor-swingers",
circulated massive amounts of text from paper to paper through the
"newspaper exchange" system, whereby cooperating newspapers sent each other
their papers for the express purpose of gathering and spreading news and
other content. Scrapbookers assumed that the more widely circulated pieces
in a paper were more worthy of being preserved in a scrapbook and newspaper
editors often made clear the sources (if not the authorship) of the texts
they obtained through the exchange system. By choosing the content of their
own scrapbooks, any reader could "write" their own book, tell a story,
assemble their own history, document events of the day, or create their own
anthology. Much of the material circulating in the newspaper exchange system
was reprinted anonymously, but authors recognized that if their name stayed
attached to a piece of their writing, it would enhance their reputation and
market value, increasing the fees for their writing, lectures, or book
deals. Mark Twain was keenly aware of this, and used his name like a brand,
cleverly writing himself into his own writings as a character or narrator,
making it difficult for editors to erase his authorship from a reprinted
piece.

Mark Twain, like other authors, preserved clippings of his own writings in
scrapbooks, and used them in his writings. Many of his early newspaper
writings were preserved this way and came in handy when he gathered up his
_Quaker City_ letters when constructing the text for _The Innocents Abroad_.
He also consulted his scrapbook when writing _Roughing It_. In _Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn_ Twain created perhaps the most famous fictional
scrapbook in American literature, containing the morbid clippings of
Emmeline Grangerford--so admired by Huck Finn. Twain used scrapbooks himself
and understood how they functioned in American society. But scrapbooking was
a slow and messy business, and always involved a glue pot and brushes, damp
pages, long waits for glue to dry, stuck pages, and spilled glue. Commercial
blank books could be used, but more often any old out-of-date ledger would
do. Often a scrapbook began life as a patent office report or an
agricultural report.

The branding Mark Twain had used to market his own writings extended to his
self-pasting scrapbook when it was introduced into the market in 1877 (it
had been patented in 1873), and he took advantage of the newspaper exchange
to spread the word of his invention. In a shrewd ploy, he wrote a comical
letter to Dan Slote, his scrapbook publisher and business partner, and
counted on newspaper editors to circulate this letter through the newspaper
exchange in the form of free advertising--and they did. In advertising
leaflets there were illustrations of scrapbooking "before" and "after" the
introduction of the Mark Twain Self-pasting Scrapbook. The "before" image
shows an angry disheveled  scrapbooker surrounded by spilt glue, a
frightened cat and wife and child, spewing lightning bolts of profanity as
he flings his old-fashioned scrapbook through the air; the "after" image
shows a genteel Victorian family enjoying their Mark Twain scrapbooks in the
tranquility of their perfectly appointed parlor.

Although the format of the Mark Twain Scrapbook scripted how an owner would
have to arrange their scrapbook--the self-pasting pages had the glue printed
on each page in columns that required the scraps to be arranged like columns
of text--the convenience was appreciated and sales were brisk. Fortunately
for Twain, patent law protected Twain's invention better than copyrights
protected his writings, and his trademarked name, of no use in protecting
the copyrights of his writings, could be used to protect a vendible product
like his scrapbook. Not too long after it entered the market, Twain's own
patented self-pasting scrapbook found its way into a work of fiction as a
prop when an Irish servant is given one as a Christmas gift in an 1881 novel
by Mary Rand. In the real world it was being used by some clever Rhode
Island librarians to discipline young readers caught reading inappropriate
materials like blood-and-thunder dime novels. The librarians filled a Mark
Twain scrapbook with clippings about boys inspired to lives of crime by
their reading choices, and using the implied authority of Mark Twain's name,
made miscreants read those clippings enshrined in a volume bearing none
other than Mark Twain's name on the cover. The popularity of the Mark Twain
Scrapbook made Twain some money, and while the citations of sales numbers
and royalties vary widely, it appears he made about $12,000 a year at the
beginning, dwindling to less than $2,000 per year in the 1880s. Twain blamed
Dan Slote's dishonesty and subsequent business failure for preventing him
from making more money from this invention.

Garvey's discussion of the Mark Twain Scrapbook ends with observations on
Will Clemens's cheeky scrapbook-like assemblage of his unauthorized
biography of Mark Twain, and the catchy jingle by Isaac H. Bromley in
"Punch, Brothers, Punch!" She describes the latter as "recirculation gone
wild" and draws convincing parallels between that verse and "found poetry"
and Marcel Duchamp's "ready-made" sculpture. The Mark Twain Scrapbook was
heavily advertised on both the cloth and paperback bindings of Twain's
_Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches_ (1878), and benefited from the
wide-spread circulation of those verses.

Her following chapters concern Civil War Scrapbooks, scrapbooks kept by
African-Americans and women, scrapbooks as archives, and a final chapter
that describes early newspaper clipping services, and the remarkable career
of newspaper dealer "Back Number Budd." She explains how scrapbooks fit into
the history of media and data management. These final chapters are
fascinating reading, but beyond the scope of the Mark Twain Forum.

Although Garvey does not include a bibliography or list of works consulted,
her text makes very clear the archives and original sources she used in her
research, and the index and footnotes are useful and informative. A few
typos and small errors of fact deserve note--Will Clemens's biography of
Mark Twain (1892) was not the first (p. 81), and General Grant was no longer
living in June, 1886 (p. 231). The work is abundantly and well-illustrated
(full disclosure: one illustration is from this reviewer's personal
collection of nearly 50 different Mark Twain Scrapbooks). The chapter on
Twain's invention benefits mightily by being placed in historical and social
context in this enjoyable and very readable history of American
scrapbooking.