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Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to 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.
Scrapbooks today are generally associated with the corridors of Michaels craft stores and a heavily clichéd, 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, for example-to dislodge the scrapbook from its disparaged status as a "trivial," "feminine" artifact and to 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 to bookmaking for groups marginalized from authorship and indeed could enable the production of vernacular histories. Garvey's method instantiates the expanded understanding of "literary" culture and production that the book 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 book is beautifully illustrated by a trove of fascinating images, from reproductions of broadsides, advertisements, and engraved illustrations to cartoons.
The scrapbook 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 people's reading, newspaper scrapbooks allowed readers to save, manage, and reprocess information while "openfing] a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to their world with their own writing"; such readers "tell their own stories in books they wrote with scissors" (4). Garvey makes a compelling case that scrapbooking was a democratic practice: "Because it used common, sometimes free materials, scrapbook making was available to people of all classes" (11). If the print revolution shaped scrapbooking, scrapbooking left its mark on newspapers and periodicals, which came to both accommodate and promote the passion...