Speaking on Scrapbooks in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Circle, Oct. 24, Hartford

I first saw a Beecher family-related scrapbook when Minton Brooks asked me to look at one now in the Brooklyn Historical Society, made by his ancestor Henry F. Minton. Henry Minton was Henry Ward Beecher’s parishioner, and had been riveted enough by

Harriet’s daughter Hattie Stowe made a cat scrapbook! (Schlesinger Library)

his minister’s doings in the unfolding Beecher Tilton sex scandal to compile clippings about them in his scrapbook, along with his own interests as a homeopathic doctor. It was the kind of unfolding news story that often inspired newspaper clipping scrapbook making. A scrapbook allowed you to collect all the sidepaths and follow them all across different newspapers.

But the Beechers and

Henry Minton scrapbook

Stowes and their friends themselves had different ideas of what to collect. And old newspapers could be turned into data, abolitionists realized in creating American Slavery as It Is – the book that Harriet Beecher Stowe kept under her pillow when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

I’m looking forward to speaking about the scrapbooks and newspaper clippings in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, CT, on Thursday, October 24, 5:30. Join me!

Back Number Budd talk Feb. 18, 1 pm, Astoria, Queens – note corrected time

Back Number Budd

If you didn’t have a scrapbook and didn’t have room for piles of newspapers in your house, how else could you find old news items? You could visit a form of offsite storage, flourishing first in a basement in midtown Manhattan, and then in an old horsecar barn in Astoria, Queens.

In the 1870s, an African American man known as Back Number Budd began sorting and organizing back issues of newspapers for sale to researchers, lawyers, and browsers. In a time before library newspaper collections or indexes, his business allowed his clients to find long lost information. Especially because he was black, buyers were suspicious of the high prices he charged for his work of sorting and saving old newspapers elsewhere considered trash. The story of his work offers a view into forgotten moments in African

1891 Astoria Map

American history.

Fire destroyed Robert Budd’s business, but competition from the New York Public Library, which started saving more newspapers, and clipping services, which came into use in the 1890s, also displaced it.

            I’m excited to be speaking about Back Number Budd on Feb. 18, 1 pm at the Greater Astoria Historical Society, not far from where Budd had has warehouse, in Ravenswood, Astoria, Long Island City.

I already had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting some of his descendents in Massachusetts, and hope that someone in Astoria will have a lead on a photo of his business – or have other stories to share.

Thanks to the Public Scholars in the Humanities, Humanities New York, for sponsoring this!

Speaking at Yale, Friday Jan. 30

Looking forward to joining Laura Wexler and the members of the Yale Photographic Memory Workshop and History of Science people at the Gilder Lehrman Centre’s Seminar room from 4:30-6:30. Open to the public — do come. I leave or Paris the next day, so this is your last chance for 5 months. (I don’t think the Photographic Memory Workshop means they study people with photographic memory, but rather the kind of work Laura has done on photography and memory, and most recently the extraordinary Photogrammar project, for searching and doing much more with FSA photos from the Depression.

First review of Writing with Scissors

How often does an academic have the generosity to write something like this?

“In prose that is clear, unjargony, and occasionally personal, Garvey gets across both the historical details and the conceptual importance of this phenomenon in the history of the United States. Even while I read ideas that were alarmingly like ones I’ve uttered myself (my own dissertation work covers similar ground, and thus at risk of an insecure, jealous, defensive response), I felt comfortable, at ease, and convinced by Garvey’s writing.” I’m no stranger to that “insecure, jealous, defensive response.” How great that PhD student Anne Donlon could be so self aware, vulnerable, and unselfish. I hope we can all learn from her.

Lovely to have this as the first review for Writing with Scissors!

Review of Writing with Scissors by Anne Donlon

 

Jan. 29 Reading in NYC — St. Mark’s Bookshop

New Yorkers — A reading from Writing with Scissors at St. Mark’s Bookshop coming up — help save this revered independent bookstore while hearing about 19th century scrapbooks! 7 pm Tuesday January 29. More information via the link. Invite your friends!  St. Marks Bookshop reading

On Kindle

Writing with Scissors is now available for Kindle. It seems odd for a book that’s much concerned with physicality — with the ways scrapbook makers cut and pasted using their literal scissors, not those little icons at the top of your screen. The scrapbook pages speak through their tactility — some are dense and heavy with pasted clippings; some are generous with white space. But of course these cutters and pasters were converting their stacks of newspapers into portable reading devices. So reading about them on Kindle, Nook, and the like is a reasonable development.

I loved learning and writing about some of the steps and developments between scrapbooks and digitization: Newspaper storage businesses, and clipping services. Here’s a picture of the Luce Clipping Bureau in the 1960s.