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This chapter provides an introduction to nineteenth-century scrapbooks. It describes how newspaper clipping scrapbooks served as a record of how people read and grappled with what they read; the people who made scrapbooks; the development of nineteenth-century newspaper clipping scrapbooks into today's photo-filled, family-centered scrapbooks; and nineteenth-century information management. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter traces the history of how readers have kept track of their reading, starting with bookmarks and commonplace books. Scrapbook making grew as cheap and even free books to paste over, became widely available. Readers displaced old book information with new clippings, asserting their individual hierarchies of reading matter: the stories they liked mattered more than sermons or information about new patents. Scrapbooks were part of a larger practice of isolating items from their original publications to recirculate within the nineteenth-century press. Editors stripped items of their attribution, or added a new authorial attribution. Authors such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox countered by devising methods to keep names attached to their works.

Mark Twain kept scrapbooks for various purposes, mocked scrapbook keepers in his writing, and invented a new type of scrapbook; he also altered and innovated the language for talking and writing about scrapbooks. This chapter shows that Twain's ambivalent relation to recirculation was tightly bound to the scrapbook he invented, which invited its buyers to write a book with his name on it, wielding their own scissors. The relationship of authorship to writing with scissors is complicated. Twain used the circuits of reprinting and recirculation to promote his scrapbook, while he undertook various frustrating attempts to protect his intellectual property from reprinting, including battling Will M. Clemens, a “maggot” who fed on his work.

The increasing popularity of scrapbook making had its seeds in the large number of Northerners and Southerners who made scrapbooks during the Civil War to grapple with and articulate their new understandings of nationhood, by saving poetry and battle news. This chapter illustrates how scrapbooks expressed national grief and rage in a private, domestic format. The contrast between the scrapbooks of a Northern abolitionist man who collected newspaper poetry to mourn his son, killed in battle, and a Southern Confederate woman, whose scrapbook is a kind of ideal newspaper where Confederate victories continued and grateful slaves abounded, tells much about the differing ideas of nationhood and the meaning of the war across the divide. Scrapbooks became their own battlefields of propaganda for saving accounts of triumphs and comparing them with emerging realities.

This chapter demonstrates how African Americans wrote histories unavailable in books by making scrapbooks of clippings from both the black and the white press. Scrapbook histories were weapons, and communal knowledge. In massive compilations—dozens or even hundreds of volumes, in some cases—black people asserted ownership of news and culture and passed along critical, oppositional reading of newspapers. The chapter draws on the work of more than a dozen nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American men and women who made scrapbooks, with special attention to three African American men who created ambitious, monumental scrapbook collections that exemplify these four projects. The oldest, Joseph W. H. Cathcart (1823 or 1827–1895), a Philadelphia janitor, created his collection of more than one hundred massive pasted volumes starting in the 1850s. His friend William H. Dorsey (1837–1923) of Philadelphia made nearly four hundred scrapbooks between the 1870s and about 1903. In a later generation, L. S. Alexander Gumby (1885–1961), a gay black collector and salon host of the Harlem Renaissance, created more than a hundred elaborate scrapbooks, mainly in the 1920s.

This chapter shows that scrapbooks kept by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and less-well-known suffragists such as Lillie Devereux Blake, Caroline Healey Dall, and Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, constitute a complex conversation about women's participation in the public realm. Scrapbooks both documented that participation and experimented with ways to present it to varied audiences; they were a training ground for impression management. Like other speakers, writers, and actors, women who wrote and spoke in public kept clipping books to document their talks and track their publications. Even the fact itself that suffragists looked to the press for personal history marks an extraordinary assertion of selfhood for women and a claim to act in the public arena. They passed along their understanding that the press was not a simple record, but a set of voices and conversations to be read critically.

Although scrapbook making was a cheap, accessible practice that allowed people to create fixed arrangements of materials that mattered to them, this chapter shows that preservation in the larger bricks-and-mortar archive has been less democratically distributed. As institutions often preferred to “document the well documented,” the materials that people sought to save in the egalitarian archive of the scrapbook often vanished or lost connection to their makers.

This chapter demonstrates how scrapbooks led the way in materializing an understanding that information was detachable, movable, sortable, and not wedded to the context in which it had been published. Other technologies developed in the late nineteenth century for accessing newspaper articles again, and then for sorting and mining them to turn them into data to move information faster. Robert Budd, an African American entrepreneur in New York, created a newspaper storage establishment. His work highlights the difference between thinking of newspapers as material objects and as movable data. In the 1890s, clipping bureaus took over and industrialized the work of saving and sorting the press that individual scrapbook makers had previously done. Scrapbooks receded as an ideal means for keeping the massive quantities of clippings that the bureaus produced; clipping savers turned toward more flexible modes of sorting and filing by multiple subject headings that developed at the same time.

This chapter examines radio poetry from two perspectives: the radio host who served as a link between public and corporate interests, and the audience with whom the host is in constant collaboration. Radio personalities like Ted Malone and Tony Wons were compelled to balance relationships with various stakeholders—home audiences on one hand, corporate radio's commercial base on the other—whose interests were not synchronized. Their solutions to this crisis took different forms, but the chapter focuses on how a guiding metaphor of poetry scrapbooking, together with the poetics of abstraction specifically enabled them to deal with such crises. The chapter aims to provide an example of the emergence of new media through partially replicating and innovating upon what came before.