*African American innovation in information management – talk on Back
Number Budd Saturday, Feb. 18, 1 pm, Astoria, Queens*
If you didn’t have a scrapbook and didn’t have room for piles of
newspapers in your house, how else could you find old news items in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries? You could visit a form of offsite
storage, flourishing first in a basement in midtown Manhattan, and then
in an old horsecar barn in Astoria, Queens.
In the 1870s, an African American man known as Back Number Budd began
sorting and organizing back issues of newspapers for sale to
researchers, lawyers, and browsers. In a time before library newspaper
collections or indexes, his business allowed his clients to find long
lost information. Especially because he was black, buyers were
suspicious of the high prices he charged for his work of sorting and
saving old newspapers elsewhere considered trash. The story of his work
offers a view into forgotten moments in African American history.
Fire destroyed Robert Budd’s business, but competition from the New York
Public Library, which started saving more newspapers, and clipping
services, which came into use in the 1890s, also displaced it.
Ellen Gruber Garvey will be speaking about Back Number Budd on Feb. 18,
1 pm at the Greater Astoria Historical Society,
<http://astorialic.org/events.php?id=1191> not far from where Budd had
has warehouse, in Ravenswood, Astoria, Long Island City. Quinn Building,
35-20 Broadway, Long Island City, NY 11106.
She already has had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting some of his
descendents in Massachusetts, and hopes that /someone/ in Astoria will
have a lead on a photo of his business – or have other stories to share.
Thanks to the Public Scholars in the Humanities, Humanities New York,
for sponsoring this! <http://humanitiesny.org/>
Ellen Gruber Garvey is the author of /Writing with Scissors: American
Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance/ (Oxford
University Press, 2013), a prizewinning book that looks at how thousands
of American newspaper readers -- from Abraham Lincoln to Susan B.
Anthony to African American janitors -- shaped their use of information
through scrapbooks.
--
Ellen Gruber Garvey, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English, New Jersey City University
Author, /Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War
to the Harlem Renaissance
<http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Scissors-American-Scrapbooks-Renaissance/dp/0199927693/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418658012&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+with+scissors>/
Visit the Scrapbook History website
<https://scrapbookhistory.wordpress.com/>
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