#scribners

The Great Gatsby (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a forest, four friends live out their lives contentesly; amiable Rat, reserved Mole, boisterous Badger and the outrageous Toad. The plot concerns Toad and his fixation on the new invention of motor cars, but there are some detours along the way.

I've never read this book before. I was helping my parents move and my siblings and I were offered any number of books to choose from. Most were worthless trash, of the sort of Christian nationalist rhetoric that's been a plague on our country these past six decades, but a few were various other books, fiction for children. I knew this book by name if not by plot, so I opted to take it for myself and give it a read (among other books, but that'll one up later).

I was, perhaps, set up to fail from the get-go. I thought the Toad mentioned in this book was the Toad from Frog and Toad, and I dearly love the musical. Finding out this was a different Toad entirely was a disappointment I endeavoured to overcome. I was for a time enchanted by the book and its illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard, and the charming little world presented by Grahame.

Alas, like the forest within, this book has an uglier side to it. It's very much a product of its time, featuring blunt and ready use of violence, classist ideas about propriety, and a lack of understanding for how dangerous cars can be, although this last point may be directed to the fact the book was written in 1908. There's a heavy focus on wholesomeness which is undercut by the understanding the author has about the world, and the rigid structures therein. Some of the actions the characters take (even when they're portrayed as good guys) are unnerving to modern audiences, and distasteful to me.

It's also just not really good at world building. The animals all have houses in the forest and some wear clothes, but there are also humans, and the humans keep some animals as pets, and sometimes the animals keep other animals as pets... When you get right down to it, the world building feels like this society has an unfortunate slavery problem.

All of this could be bearable, manageable at least, if the book were entertaining. Unfortunate, problematic or outdated fiction has its place in the modern day, and the book is a historically-significant icon that's important to maintain. But the worst sin this book commits is that it's boring. I have no attachment to the characters, and the prose is not terribly good, pointing at important themes where it doesn't say the themes outright. I struggled to read this one, even two short pages making me groan and look away. It's like a bog in the forest: the view is nice, but you're always getting stuck, and something smells awful.

There are gleams of something interesting just trying to get out here. Pan shows up at one point, and the book becomes something magical. Mole finding his home again is a warm, inviting passage, full of empathy and pathos. But it's not enough to keep me trudging through the bog.

I find more interest in the physical book itself, whose picture I have shown is a copy of the one I have. The book in my hands is old. This is not unusual; I have read and held old books before. The book was published six years before ISBN numbers were invented, so tracking down information about it is hard, but I'm able to with some other clues. It was much harder to track down an unofficial copy of A Study in Scarlet, which turned out to be over 120 years old, and I have a copy of The Arabian Nights from 1914, two books that are both older and have some associated mysteries.

The thing that gets me is the sheer living this book went through. It was owned and then donated to a Christian school, who had to apply a barcode for their internal system. They got it wrong, too; the printed internal number is 1873, but multiple handwritten notes and the barcode confirm 1895. (I had thought these were dates at first which confused me). There is a library records card that shows who checked out the book and when, the last dates including years for '98; if you follow the math back, kids started reading this in '92. Several kids borrowed it again immediately after they returned it, the first, Karen E, borrowing it three times. It's covered in cuts and bruises, exuberant children leaving stains, tearing pages, breaking the spine and drawing along the edges, but someone has gone and taped and coerced the book into as good a shape as it can, and even still some pages are falling out. It's also got a Gaylord book jacket.

Book 198

Periods of Typography: French Sixteenth Century Printing

A.F. Johnson

Charles Scribner’s Sons 1928

This blog post was written by Maddy Dean, a student in Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick’s ENGLIT 0512 Narrative and Technology Course. This class visited Archives & Special Collections in the Fall 2021 term.

Since the 19th century, narrative technologies have appealed to the masses publicly through periodical printing – even the traditional novel started appearing periodically throughout publications. Charles Dickens’ “The Personal History of David Copperfield” (1849-1850) and Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms" in Scribner’s magazine (1929) were published monthly for distribution to the public, with advertisements and the inclusion of other fiction pieces to be consumed and shared between friends and families.

(Above) An advertisement for Home Goods in Scribner’s October issue. Hemingway, Ernest. “A Farewell to Arms.” Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.  Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Bookending each of Hemingway’s and Dickens’ serial fictions, the advertisements invite readers to browse different products, services, and even books before diving into a volume of the novel. These ads offer a level of interactivity and immersion that can almost be equated to ads we see on television or online today. Readers had the choice of either skipping over ads and diving straight into the magazine pieces or browsing the columns for things like household furniture or printing services (pictured above). An interesting feature of the narrative discourse  offered in these magazines is the inclusion of ads for books and publications by authors other than Hemingway or Dickens. Advertising other pieces informs readers of new stories and authors, but it also takes away from the idea of single authorship in a book since the novel appears in a periodical, not in traditional book format.

These ads also suggest the type of audience who read magazine fictions, with home goods and beauty services appealing to the public. Ads for printing services and other stories indicate that readers of Hemingway and Dickens were also interested in reading other works and maybe even publishing their own (pictured below). They show that narratives are not always composed of just a story but include other elements that invite readers to browse their contents and choose what they want to read. Ads act as element of narrative discourse, changing how the novels are read and viewed through their inclusion either before or after the actual story. The magazines serve as a form of entertainment as well as advertisement.

(Above) an advertisement for copying machines in a volume of David Copperfield. Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. The Personal History of David Copperfield. 1st ed., Bradbury & Evans, 1849. Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

The periodical printing of Hemingway’s and Dicken’s novels also suggests that audiences in this period preferred serialization for a quick read rather than consuming the novel in its entirety. Readers would pass the periodicals along to other families or cut them up for the print – ads that might be beneficial to save or special sections of the novel volume to be read again. Similar to magazines we might pick up in the check-out line at the grocery store today, audiences of magazine fictions passed along these novels or retired them to the bookshelf after consuming their content, eagerly waiting for publication of the next volume.  

After exploring “A Farewell to Arms” in Scribner’s magazine and David Copperfield, it’s clear that readers engaged and appreciated narrative technology by buying a new volume each month, passing the stories onto others to share the great works of Hemingway and Dickens. These periodical magazines are comparable to current magazines and even streaming services that we interact with daily. Subscriptions, the inclusion of ads, and the choice to read (or watch) different stories is still present in narrative technologies and guides our understanding and experience of narratives. While narrative technologies constantly change, it’s evident that the audience consuming these narratives consists of the mass public, reading and absorbing new information as narrative form continues to evolve.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. The Personal History of David Copperfield. 1st ed., Bradbury & Evans, 1849.

endpapers for Scribner’s reprint of Captain Blood, painted by Dean Cornwell.