Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance: [Book Review]

Ellen Garvey's Writing with Scissors provides a meticulously researched and provocative glimpse of the ways that men, women, and children used the newspapers they read in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Garvey analyzes a form of activity—making scrapbooks out of newspaper clippings—that was increasingly popular by the 1850s. But “writing with scissors” did not in fact involve “writing” at all— at least not as we tend to think about that form of communication, reflection, record keeping, or creativity. Indeed, as Garvey explains, scrapbook makers rarely included written commentary in their crowded pages of pasted scraps. Yet it is extremely productive to see scrapbooks as a form of writing because scrapbook makers created new meaning for news articles, poems, and stories by lifting them out of their initial frame, often cutting off the name of the author and newspaper, and providing a fresh context for “writing that mattered...