Scrapbooking is Cool, OK?
To create this exhibit, it was not necessary to scrub through months of records of New Bedford newspapers to find mention of the Junior mutiny. It was all already collected, curated even, by New Bedford resident William Tripp, in the art of the scrapbook. A scrapbook is a collection of scraps - photos, newspaper clippings, etc, that are pasted into a new book. This scrapbook, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, was a common method of saving and reorganizing information that people thought was important. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, as the availability of print newspapers exploded, many famous and important people were the authors of newspaper clipping scrapbooks, including Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.
Garvey, in her 2012 book on the history of scrapbooking in America, argues that despite the use of scrapbooking by prominent and important figures, it was also a way for people without much influence to shape and curate what they were reading. This act of collecting what they were reading and what they thought was important or interesting was a way to create value, on both the individual and collective level, for all sorts of people. It was a way to understand and remember important events in the world or in the community.
Tripp’s scrapbook, titled “Junior Mutiny - News Items, Court Trial, and Copy of Log Book” is a fantastic example of the scrapbook as creating value. The Junior mutiny, as the clippings from the scrapbook themselves testify, was of great interest to the city of New Bedford in 1858. Tripp recognized this interest, and was able to preserve not only the story, but the community’s reactions to the event at the time.
Scrapbook Front Matter
This image is of the opening pages of the scrapbook, describing ownership and contents. There are two stamps with the name William H. Tripp, one with an address in New Bedford, and one with a depiction of a whale and a date. Tripp seems to be a New Bedford resident interested in whaling and its history. It is likely he is the curator of the scrapbook. It also includes his signature in the upper left.
There is also a sticker that indicates that the book was once in the hands of the Kendall Whaling Museum, of Nantucket, MA.
Annual Review on the State of the American Whale Fishery
A fascinating aspect of this scrapbook is that the final 29 pages are newspaper clippings of the annual reviews on the state of the American whale fishery, from 1828-1863. These reviews are a stark shift in content from the exceedingly comprehensive coverage of a specific mutiny. This specific excerpt is a review of the year 1859, the year of the Junior saga. Even more interesting is that the pages are, in the physical copy (not in the digitized version available via the Internet Archive), upside down, with the pagination descending from 29 to 1. This indicates that the scrapbook contains two separate topics or even books, and it is supposed to be flipped over and turned around and read normally again from the back to the centre.
Handwritten Notes
Another interesting yet typical aspect of this scrapbook is that there are handwritten parts that go alongside the clippings of printed text. These handwritten notes can be seen throughout the excerpts in this exhibit, and include page numbers, dates, copied text from documents that couldn’t be cut out, and explanations about the dual sided structure of the two halves of the book. The example in this excerpt tells the reader where to find the next section of newspaper clippings, located on page 23, after the handwritten copy of the ship’s log. Garvey writes that many scrapbook creators, creating often for their future selves, thought the connection between items in their book was self-evident and thus didn’t include explanatory text. Tripp’s attention to detail here implies that he created this scrapbook not just for his own use but with other readers in mind as well.