The Authorship of Blank Books: Mark Twain Scrapbooks and the Patent Office's Useless Books

Ellen Garvey

Scrapbooks are unique items, like manuscripts, made from mass produced newspapers and other materials, usually available cheap or free. Readers selected and organized them in ways that made them more valuable to them. This paper looks at the economic and cultural value attached to the printed codex book, in relation to its repurposing as a scrapbook, and in contrast to the blank books available for scrapbook making. One such book was Mark Twain's Patented Scrap Book, which in addition to offering the scrapbook maker a ready-to-use pre-glued page, offered a kind of joint authorship: Mark Twain's name was part of the scrapbook description. I look at these scrapbooks in relation to copyright issues and to commonplacing.