Hot slugs! What a Jazz Age Scrapbook Teaches Us About Materiality

Hot slugs! What a Jazz Age Scrapbook Teaches Us About Materiality

81357_26_Hinshaw

As both academics and the public grapple with the nature of books and the impact of digital media on our daily lives,  one of the issues at the forefront of the discussion is materiality. How is a book made and distributed, who buys it and how do they use it? How are its physical characteristics related to its reception and influence? Does the shift to digital negatively alter patterns of consumption and creation?  You might think “A book is a book”, but often the answers to these questions are far more complicated and interesting, if difficult to elucidate for the majority of texts. Sometimes, though, the physical importance of a book is immediately obvious. We recently had an evocative piece with a particularly strong material presence, a Jazz Age scrapbook and diary that sheds light not only on the culture of the 1920s and the experience of a young person’s coming of age, but the relationship between an object and its consumer/creator.

Flapper Scrapbook

Senior year scrapbook compiled by Christine Hinshaw in 1925.

The owner of this scrapbook was a young woman named Christine Hinshaw, who was born in Winchester Indiana in 1908, the daughter of Dr. Otis W. Hinshaw and his wife Luetta Pearl Moody, both from well-to-do Quaker families. From the evidence of the scrapbook, Christine was a popular and outgoing student who served as the class secretary and was a member of the English Club, Drama Club, the Guild Girls (a church group), and the Delta Theta Tau sorority.

The book itself is a purpose-made school scrapbook divided into sections such as autographs; clubs and activities; sports, dances and other entertainments; “stunts & jokes”; “Kodak snap-shots”; and commencement. Though the book is copyrighted 1910 and the interior illustrations are in Edwardian and Art Nouveau styles, the cover is decorated with an up-to-date Art Deco design, indicating that the firm re-published it year after year, updating only the covers to save on expenses.

Flapper scrapbook

Hinshaw received the scrapbook on May 30, 1925 and began writing in it immediately, making extensive notes and also preserving the material traces of her experiences. A close look reveals that she initially based her topics on the printed headings, neatly entering her name and high school and describing various activities in their labelled sections. But she also adapted it to her own particular use, often ignoring the printed titles and using the pages differently than the publishers intended. In this way she took full advantage of each leaf, filling the book completely and creating a complex and highly personal record that goes far beyond a simple school scrapbook.

Flapper Scrapbook

The first section of the book is for classmate and teacher autographs and photos, but instead Christine lists them by name (the book was a graduation gift, so she may not have had the opportunity to obtain signatures in person), and writes notes, nicknames, and jokes alongside. Ruby Graft was “Sure a good old sport” and Don Baker had “loose paper scattered on the floor – Oh no!”, while history teacher Kate Brooks had “finally got married”, and of the school coach she had this to say: “By garsh he knew his onions!”

Flapper Scrapbook

Flapper Scrapbook

Hinshaw’s personality shines throughout the scrapbook, particularly in chatty, humorous recollections of her friends and their hijinks.  One evening after a meeting of the English Club, “a bunch of us kids went to one of the cafes up town & danced with their player piano. Bill Moorman’s lights on his car went out, it rained – oh how it rained! We got home way after midnight”. On another page she copies the joke poem “He drank but once, he drank no more, what he thought was H20 was H2SO4” and commented that, “I don’t know any Chemistry but they say its poison. I mean H2SO4”. Jazz Age culture makes a striking appearance in small-town Indiana when she writes that, “Joanna Mills was up at the dance with her hair slicked back fit to kill. She said ‘Look me over folks I’m from Broadway.’ Hot slugs” (her favourite exclamation, used frequently in the scrapbook).

Flapper Scrapbook

Calling and greeting cards.

Flapper Scrapbook

Holiday cards.

Flapper Scrapbook

Hinshaw was active in the The Drama Club, which “practised every morning from 8.30 to 9am on ‘Come out of the Kitchen’. With Fred Oxley & Geo Kendall running wild really the moral standard of our class was VERY low”. She writes about the play alongside a programme and a clipped newspaper review in which the reporter describes Hinshaw as having “covered herself with glory” in the lead role. She used the next page of the scrapbook to preserve the ribbons from her diploma, even though it was intended for “spreads & entertainments”.

Flapper Scrapbook

School play review and diploma ribbons.

Social rounds were also a significant part of Hinshaw’s life. She attended numerous bridge parties even though she was often “bored to tears. Bridge parties make me sick”, and pasted a number of Art Deco-style scorecards into the scrapbook.

Flapper Scrapbook

Bridge scorecard.

Flapper Scrapbook

Bridge scorecard.

Memories of a dances are preserved via a dance card with its tiny pencil still attached by string, as well as three full corsages.

Flapper Scrapbook

Dance card – “had a wonderful time”.

Flapper Scrapbook

Corsage.

Flapper Scrapbook

Dried flowers originally given for commencement, “They were awfully pretty”.

A high point of the summer was her attendance as a delegate at the three-day “Sunday School Convention” (The Indiana Convention of Religious Education) held at Winona Lake in June, her description accompanied as usual by newspaper clippings, programmes, and other ephemera.

Flapper Scrapbook

Graduation, as to be expected, forms a substantial portion of her remembrances, and she describes the event itself as well as satellite activities like dinners, picnics, and dances.

Flapper Scrapbook

Graduation programme.

These celebrations required a new wardrobe, and on two pages she pastes in the pattern-book illustrations of the dresses she had made, along with fabric swatches and notes. A peach silk dress was modeled after a professional pattern but altered so that it “Didn’t have any sleeves or collar,” and a dress made of moddish blue and red patterned fabric “Had a lace collar and jabo ”. She sketches her graduation dress and writes, “I had blond satin slippers there awfully pretty”. Fashion was clearly an important part of Hinshaw’s life. At one point she wonders about her new clothes for college and whether she will get a fur coat. When her parents give her a diamond ring as a graduation present she becomes too excited to attend a school event scheduled for later that day.

Flapper Scrapbook

The most substantial way that Hinshaw altered the scrapbook, though, was by transforming it into a poignant diary recording the summer between high school and college, as basic descriptions of class activities become longer entries discussing her day-to-day life and the excitement and anxiety she felt at embarking on adult life. Early in the book she describes her classmates’s transitions into employment or college, noting with some sadness that “Certainly doesn’t take a class long to scatter”. Later she writes, “We seniors were going to have a picnic or a party before we got scattered but we didn’t…lot of the kids are working. There were 34 in our class and not half of them were at Alumni”. By Alumni she meant the Alumni Banquet, where she “Had a pretty good time. This is the last function. Now we are DONE”.

Though her school days were ending, new opportunities presented themselves. “Mary Robinson is to be married June 29 and she has asked me to play at her wedding. I sure got a kick out of that. I have never played at a wedding before”.

Flapper Scrapbook

Flapper Scrapbook

Ribbon from wedding corsage.

In July Hinshaw spent a week with the Guild Girls at a cottage by Lake Webster, and though her mother was a chaperone, Christine was allowed to “take our car up & keep it there”. Along with her description of the lake trip she pastes in a butterfly she found, which is still remarkably intact.

Flapper Scrapbook

In an entry dated July-August 1925 Hinshaw reports that she is “learning how to cook. Get all the meals. Boy I’m keen. Clean chickens bake cakes & pies. Hot stuff! Am teaching Mom to drive the car. She tickles me so”. Though Hinshaw relates most of the stress of graduation with upbeat humour, she does record one momentary loss of equilibrium, an unusual, stream-of-consciousness entry. “Camping with . It’s awful cold. Still run the radio. Aunt Blanch comes down a lot. Gee. Talk about cooking – but I really do like it. I would like to write something here but I guess I won’t. It’s nothing anyhow only a bubble. Sometimes strange things happen. I love to ride horseback”.

Flapper Scrapbook

Throughout the summer Hinshaw prepared for the start of college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, about fifty miles south of Winchester. In a wonderful example of both her pride and trepidation at entering college she writes that she had to, “get my certificate filled out for Miami…. Made 159 on it. 120 is normal intelligence. Hot slugs. Wonder folks don’t put on dark glasses when there near me. Oh yes I oughta make something wonderful of my self. I’ll probably take in washing”.

Flapper Scrapbook

The final entry in the scrapbook reads, “Was over at school a minute this afternoon. There are so many new kids it doesn’t any more seem natural I have no desire to go back. I am no longer Pres of Guild or Secretary to Delta Theta Tau. I have gone to the last card party I will attend before I leave & have had Delta tonight. My trunk is gone & I’m all ready. I can hardly wait. Sure & I suppose I’ll get homesick but who hasn’t. There will be over 800 in my class. Am not expecting to know them all the first day. People this certainly is a great life if you don’t weaken”.* Hinshaw’s conclusion is followed by the only such illustration she made in the scrapbook, a stick figure in a skirt and feathered hat carrying a suitcase toward a building that looks like a house but is labelled “Miami”.

Flapper Scrapbook

Hinshaw’s scrapbook is an entirely personal, deeply engaging, and visually enchanting record of one young woman’s coming of age during the Roaring Twenties. But it’s also a wonderful example of an individual creatively combining book, text, images, and ephemera as a record of her life.  Though pundits like to argue about the ways that new technologies alter or enforce certain behaviors, we can look to this much older technology, the scrapbook, to understand how individuals take control of the tools at their disposal and adapt them to their own circumstances.

*This phrase, a rallying cry for soldiers during the First World War, had become popular as the title of a Gene Byrnes comic strip published in the New York Evening Telegram between 1915 and 1919.

For more Jazz Age culture visit our post Flappers at Sea, and click here to browse our stock.

Metropolis: A Rare Film Programme for Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece

Metropolis: A Rare Film Programme for Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece

Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 1927

Original Metropolis film programme for the British premiere of Fritz Lang’s film in 1927.

The world’s most valuable movie poster, for Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, is to be auctioned again after making a record $690,000 in 2005. Ephemera related to the film is notoriously scarce, with only four copies of the poster known to survive.

Almost as uncommon is this amazing Metropolis film programme produced for the London premiere at the Marble Arch Pavilion on March 21, 1927, one of only three copies that we have handled.

Not only a list of cast and crew, it includes eleven short pieces on the making of the movie, commentary from the director and cast, and numerous production photographs and film stills, many attractively arranged as modernist collages.

One of the most interesting sections shows in parallel columns how a passage of film scenes was adapted from the novel of the same name by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou.

Below the fold you’ll find the complete booklet – just click any image for the high-res version:

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Plasticine: Clean, Harmless and Ever Plastic

Plasticine: Clean, Harmless and Ever Plastic

 

Early ad for plasticine, 1899

Early ad for plasticine, 1899.

I found this ad in a copy of The Butterfly, a literary magazine published in London in March of 1899. This must be one of the very earliest ads for plasticine, which was invented in 1897 by an art instructor named William Harbutt. After teaching at the Royal College of Art he moved to Bath in 1874, where he founded his own academy, the Paragon School of Art. Harbutt noticed that many of his beginning students had difficulty using clay, which was heavy and often dried out before projects could be completed. In the search for a suitable alternative he began experimenting with different substances at home, involving the whole family and using a garden roller to squeeze excess water out of his concoctions. Harbutt perfected the formula in 1897 and began supplying it to his students, and then to other artists who heard of the material by word of mouth. But it was his grandchildren’s interest in the substance that convinced him he might have a successful toy in the making. The patent on plasticine was granted in 1899, so this must be one of the earliest ads for the new material, and I strongly suspect that the rather dour child in the photo is Harbutt’s grandson. Later Harbutt would hire the graphic designer John Hassell, who became famous for his commercial posters, to design colourful and eye-catching ads, as well as the plasticine packaging. Harbutt’s big break came when he was able to purchase an ad in a new publication called The Royal Magazine, which premiered in 1898. Unfortunately, I can’t determine whether that ad appeared before this one did. This ad is, in any case, a delightful bit of late-Victorian marketing, particularly the tagline “A capital present for any child either ‘Bright or Backward'”.

For further reading, the best place to go is probably the book companion to the BBC documentary series James May’s Toy Stories, which included an entire episode on plasticine. You can buy the book online, and the Google Books preview includes a number of the pages on the history of plasticine. As part of the documentary, May and a group of volunteers created a plasticine garden and entered it in the Chelsea Flower Show, which you can see here.

I did find an image of one other early ad for plasticine, though this one is much more sophisticated and probably several years later than ours. If you know of any others that have been digitised please do leave a comment!

Wanted for Incitement to Murder: Winston S. Churchill

Wanted for Incitement to Murder: Winston S. Churchill

Churchill Wanted for Incitement to Murder

Wanted for Incitement to Murder: Nazi propaganda leaflet of Churchill with a Thompson sub-machine gun.

One of the most famous propaganda images of the Second World War, this photo of Winston Churchill with a Thompson sub-machine gun, or Tommy gun, was taken while the Prime Minister was inspecting a coastal defence unit at Hartlepool in July 1940. But Churchill’s resemblance to a stereotypical American mobster wasn’t lost on the Nazis, who began dropping these propaganda leaflets over Britain within weeks of the photo being taken. These leaflets are very delicate, making original copies extremely uncommon.

Churchill Wanted for Incitement to Murder propaganda leaflet

Verso of the Churchill propaganda leaflet.