![]() ![]() He used this device in some of his earliest published work, for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, in the Nevada territory. Samuel Clemens made sure that no matter how often his stories were reprinted, they retained the name Mark Twain-by writing in the character of Mark Twain. Then, reprinting could make them famous and lead to higher future fees or lucrative lecture engagements, as I discovered in my research for Writing with Scissors. While authors typically were paid only for the first use of a story or poem, a reprinted piece could attract attention around the country-if the author’s name remained attached to the work. Literary authors such as Twain could benefit from exchanges when they were starting out. It was a sign of acclaim for a newspaper when its works were “scissorized,” as the practice was sometimes called, and reprinted widely. Contrary to Nye in “The Editorial Shears,” Thomas Weaver, editor of the Hartford Post, argued that exchanges improved newspapers: “The scissors, well used, can give the product of five hundred brains in one newspaper, and one brain plus five hundred is a great deal better than when it stands alone on its own originality, no matter how great that originality may be.” Before aggregated news services like the Associated Press gathered and redistributed news, the exchange system created a nationwide network of information. ![]() Larger newspapers had specialized scissors-wielding exchange editors, who scanned piles of papers prowling for material to print. government even encouraged them, offering publishers free postage to mail newspapers to other newspapers, via a system known as exchanges. Baldwin’s Monthly, October 1874ĭespite Nye’s complaint, in the late 19th century editors did not think there was anything wrong with filling their columns with material they freely borrowed from other papers. This exchange editor separates the wheat from the chaff, “scissorizing” newspapers and passing along only the best articles. Such scrapbooks are a rich source for historians, as they sometimes are the only extant permanent record of information from newspapers and magazines that long ago went out with the trash, as I discuss in Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2013). He kept scrapbooks, as did thousands of others, including some of his neighbors at Nook Farm in Hartford, where he lived across the lawn from Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family. He went on to take revenge on those avid reprinters with an unlikely weapon: a scrapbook he invented. Samuel Clemens used his catchy pen name Mark Twain strategically to hold onto his intellectual property, in the face of rapacious, credit-free reprinting, by inserting Mark as a character into his early stories. What if you were a young writer starting out? How could you keep editors from stealing your shirt? ![]() They were like thieves stealing a man’s only shirt from the clothesline while he is “in bed and therefore helpless,” Nye wrote in “The Editorial Shears,” an article gathering comments about reprinting in the Austin, Texas newspaper Texas Siftings, February 27, 1886. The humorist Bill Nye, who sometimes lectured with Mark Twain, protested bitterly against editors who snipped off bylines. If they wrote something appealing and it was published in a particular newspaper, other newspapers and magazines would freely reprint it without crediting the author-unless the writer had become well-known and his or her name helped sell papers. Winter 2020-2021 Subscribe/Buy the Issue!īack in Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time (the late 19th century) American writers had a problem. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Editors reprinted it and joked about it, thereby publicizing the scrapbook without cost to Clemens. Advertisement with Mark Twain’s letter describing his invention. ![]()
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