Query: Diaries

[KEVIN JOEL BERLAND]

I seem to recall a discussion some time ago in which the period of the first "published" blank diaries was established. That is, according to the OED, "A book prepared for keeping a daily record, or having spaces with printed dates for daily memoranda and jottings." Can anybody please refresh my memory, or point me to a resource documenting this bit of book history? Thanks.

Cheers -- Kevin

[Leon Jackson]

Kevin:

In America, at least, the first preprinted diary appears to have been *The
General American Register and Gentleman's Complete Annual Account Book and
Calendar for the Pocket or Desk for . . . 1773*, published by Robert Aitken
in Philadelphia and available for sale in late 1772. According an the
advertisement Aitken placed in the Philadelphia Chronicle* 12 December
1772, this was "the first attempt of its kind" in America.

We need, however, to exercise a degree of caution when dealing with the
issue of first and priority in such genres, for as Molly McCarthy, from
whose excellent dissertation I draw this information, argues, the
preprinted, daily diary emerged slowly from the practice of inscribing
memoranda in almanacs, and, later ledgers and account books, which, while
they were not intended for such uses, offered preprinted grids and uniform
temporal frameworks for such diary entries. As such, according the
McCarthy, the roots of the daily diary are to be found in these print
genres rather than in blank books, such as those used by other, earlier
diarists. See Molly McCarthy, "A Page, A Day" A History of the Daily Diary
in America" (PhD diss., Brandeis Univ., 2004), esp. 1-169. I hope that this
helps!

Leon



----
Prof. Leon Jackson | e-mail: ***@gwm.sc.edu
Dept. of English | phone : [phone] [W]
University of South Carolina | office: Humanities 419
Columbia, SC 29208 | * * * * * * * * *

[Barnhill, Georgia B.]

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Center for Historic
American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society

Call for Papers

Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of New England,
1600-1830

November 9 & 10, 2007
Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts

It has been twenty-five years since the path-breaking exhibition New
England Begins opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibit,
and its comprehensive three-volume catalogue, brought new scholarly
attention to the art, artifacts and built environment of early New
England. Since that time, the discipline of material culture has
matured, while the emerging field of visual culture has brought new
methods and genres to bear on the study of images, objects, landscapes
and the technologies that shaped them. This two-day conference,
sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Center for
Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society,
will assess new approaches to the material and visual culture of New
England. Reflecting the scholarly trends that have emerged in the past
quarter century, the conference will extend the chronological scope of
inquiry to embrace the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and will
explicitly address the innovative work being done in the field of visual
culture. We particularly welcome proposals that address Native American
and African-American material and visual culture as well as proposals
that engage broad theoretical, methodological, and historiographical
approaches.

The conference committee will consider individual submissions as well as
panels with three papers and a moderator/commentator. Two-page
proposals accompanied by a two-page c.v. for each presenter should be
sent via electronic mail to Georgia B. Barnhill, curator of graphic arts
at the American Antiquarian Society (***@mwa.org). For further
information, please contact Martha McNamara (***@maine.edu) or
Georgia Barnhill. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2006.




Georgia B. Barnhill
Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts
American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
[phone]
[phone] (fax)
***@mwa.org; www.americanantiquarian.org

[Kathryn Carter]

Kevin, I will be interested to find out what you learn. I was in touch with Letts in England some years ago to try to answer the same question in a British context, but I didn't get very far--they are a functioning corporation with perhaps a different understanding of archives than me. In the Canadian context, there is evidence that matches Molly's: people used blank books for accounting purposes that sometimes bled over into spiritual accounting. For an example, you can take a look at my article "An Economy of Words: Emma Stretch's Account Book Diary, 1859-1860" in Acadiensis a journal of Altantic Cdn history. I don't have evidence of the books you describe being published in Canada until the latter half of the nineteenth century (also a reflection of a later developing publishing industry in Canada) and I can dig up that reference if you think it would be useful. You'd be wise to contact Molly as well--she has done a lot of archival digging.

Kathryn Carter, Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor, English
Interim Program Co-ordinator,
Contemporary Studies
218 Grand River Hall
Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford
[phone] X5741
Fax: [phone]