Clippings

I lent an old book to a friend the other day and mentioned when I handed it to her that there was a newspaper clipping folded up in the back, an obituary for someone described in the book. I know it is not good to keep such things in books – they stain and erode the pages, put pressure on the binding, and eventually result in yellow newsprint confetti. But the obituary added another dimension to the story: vertical time – this person’s long life – at a right angle to the horizontal time – the here and now, circa 1922 – of the book’s subject.

The newspaper clipping used to be an important way of saving and sharing information, and I have not gotten out of the habit in the age of the internet. True, these days I do the “esheehan has sent you an article” routine much of the time, although I dislike the third party intervention and the barrel of ads and cookies such “clippings” deliver to my friends’ computers. And the emailed or linked article does allow the recipient to print clean copies or forward to others, or, more likely, store the email until a respectful period of time has passed and she can delete it, unread. I am okay with that. An emailed article is always a potential intrusion, possibly even critique.

But I come from a long line of newspaper clippers and I still like to send and get the real thing, sometimes cut into ziggurats of odd column lengths and origami-ed into an envelope. In the old days, if an article was too outrageously formatted, I would spend considerable time at the office copier trying to getting the whole thing down to one or two pages, the first a 94% reduction, the second maybe 86%. Of course, access to a copier used to be a major justification for working, aside from paying the rent and eating. I would use the copies for teaching, or burden friends and colleagues with them if I thought they were of interest. One of my supervisors actually noted in a letter of reference for me how she would miss the little bundles of articles I would leave in her office mailbox. Perhaps.

There are different kinds of clippings: the cut direct, the paste-up job, the Xerox special. And different sources: the handover, which includes mailed articles, the anonymous insert (especially rewarding while browsing in a used book store), the legacies found in family papers. My Irish-born grandmother cut from her upstate New York newspaper a photo of Irish independence being celebrated in 1949 in front of Dublin’s General Post Office, scene of bloody fighting during the 1916 Easter Uprising. My grandmother left Ireland as a teenager in the first years of the twentieth century and never returned. But clearly the founding of the Republic meant something to her. I hardly knew her, but I know this.

And then there is the closely related category of whole newspapers saved for their significance. I have been carrying a box of these with me for decades, building on my mother’s collection. JFK’s assassination, then MLK’s and RFK’s. (A sharp high school memory: seeing the New York Daily News’ front page, with the blurred image of Bobby’s head on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, scuffed and torn on the platform of the 14th street subway station.) Nixon resigns. Ford to City: Drop Dead. The Statue of Liberty Centennial. Clinton’s first election, and then the Starr Report. And 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. How long will I save each year’s anniversary issue of the New York Times? I think of the Civil War veterans meeting a half century later at Gettysburg and imagine those who remember 9/11 someday being like them, a frail, dwindling brotherhood.

The whole newspaper, of course, creates the mise en scène -- movie ads and white sales at Gimbel’s, the racing results and op-eds by dead wise men. Many years ago my friend Steve ripped up generations of linoleum in his New York tenement kitchen and found a Pearl Harbor-era newspaper used as lining for the 1941 stratum. He gathered it up and went to the local coffee shop and read it at the counter over his eggs and bagel. No one commented, but then most of the habitués had been at that counter since the second FDR administration. I have a 1967 copy of the Village Voice that takes me back to the days of be-ins and head shops on Eighth Street. I am Curious (Yellow).

But the random clipping is a very intimate form of communication, especially when the message is unintentional. I have my father’s handwriting on things he saved. He died more than thirty years ago but his notations, his obsessions really, show how his mind worked and where his interests overlapped with mine. They extend the reach into the past: an article from the 1960s about events that happened in the 1930s stuck in a book about the 1890s, and all connected.

People worry if newspapers will exist in years to come. If they disappear, clippings will go with them. These days we have the “most popular” list of emailed and searched articles on newspaper websites, a form of literary ranking unknown fifteen years ago but vulnerable to the whims of hard drives and servers. I’d rather cut the article out, save it, or send it along: I saw this and thought of you.