The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America 9780226033495

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The Accidental Diarist

The Accidental Diarist A History of the Daily Planner in America

mol ly mc ca r t h y the universit y of chicago press

chicago and london

molly mccarthy is the associate director of the Humanities Institute at University of California, Davis. In the past, she has held teaching positions at Stanford University, Wellesley College, and Queens College, CUNY. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013 Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-03321-1 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03335-8 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03349-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Molly. The accidental diarist : a history of the daily planner in America / Molly McCarthy. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-03321-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —isbn 978-0-226-03335-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) —isbn 978-0-226-03349-5 (e-book) 1. Diaries—History and criticism. 2. Almanacs, American. I. Title. pn4390.m38 2013 808.06'692—dc23 2013005590 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Table of Contents Introduction 1 chapter 1. The Almanac as Daily Diary 11 chapter 2. The Birth of a Daily Planner

54

chapter 3. The Profits of an Abbreviated Self 102 chapter 4. Making a Diary Standard 153 chapter 5. The Daily Planner Meets the Adman 201 Epilogue

243

Acknowledgments 249 Notes

255

Index

299

Introduction

T

he Accidental Diarist is the biography of a book. I found it, or it found me, as I rooted around the archives in search of a paper topic for my fi rst graduate school assignment. The fi rst time I saw it I did not know what to make of it. It looked so familiar, even modern, but strangely distant. It resembled the Day Runner I had stashed in my backpack. It contained a calendar, monthly tables for recording expenses, and other useful trivia, plus a page-a-day section for record keeping that I had come to expect from my own daily planner. And yet the year on the title page read “1873.” It belonged to a woman named Jane Fiske, who, as far as I could tell from a cursory scan of her entries, was a painfully lonely New Hampshire farmwife as well as a faithful diarist. Fiske’s collection took up an entire box, a total of forty-two volumes spanning four decades into the twentieth century. Diaries of the time were commercially printed and sold at local bookshops, with titles such as the Standard Diary, the American Diary, and the Excelsior Diary, and they arrived just in time for the opening of a new year. What I found in Fiske’s volumes was not the kind of diary I would have expected of a nineteenth-century housewife. I figured Fiske for a thick, hardbound journal of blank leaves fi lled with emotional outbursts about her daily hardships. And while her page-a-day did allow some room for venting, Fiske’s subject matter was more practical, confi ned to daily tasks and tracking the hours of the farm laborers hired to help with mowing and stacking hay. This entry dated June 24, 1873, was typical: “Cool morning but day much warmer. Six haymakers today. Had help about getting dinner & supper, but suffered for it. Mrs. Flanders called. Julia here to wash.” And on it went for more than forty years.1 I wanted to know where Fiske’s Standard Diaries came from and how

Figure 0.1. The title page of Jane Fiske’s 1873 Diary. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Introduction

3

they got into the hands of a New Hampshire farmwife. I needed to understand what was in it (both the daily planner and the daily habit) for Fiske. What made her buy a planner every year and compose a record that appeared, at fi rst glance, to be full of information but, to my eyes at least, empty of meaning? I also wanted to know who made these diaries, a technologically unspectacular yet wildly popular format that eased generations of Americans into a daily habit that they might otherwise have missed. I soon realized that I had not uncovered one woman’s unique set of store-bought diaries but stumbled on a fascinating and untold piece of media history. For Fiske’s diaries were not unique at all. By the midnineteenth century, the daily planner was ubiquitous, available in bookshops, at local stationers, and in general stores. By the 1880s Standard Diaries were available by mail order, a popular addition to Montgomery Ward’s “book department.” I set about documenting the history of this evolving genre of diary that, in an age when we expect technological innovations in communication and timekeeping to foster monumental changes, allowed customers to accept such changes at their own pace and adapt their daily planners to uses unanticipated by the entrepreneurs who paid close attention to shifting market demands. This biography weaves together the stories of the daily planner’s customers and its producers. Rather than recounting the experience of one or the other, I focus on the interplay between individuals and entrepreneurs, of cultural need versus market innovation, of the stubbornness of individualism versus the standardization of life. I argue that the daily planner was more than just an unassuming stationery product that turned thousands of Americans into daily diarists. It shaped how customers told time and tracked their money. It helped some users move into modernity while allowing others to retain a connection to older modes of accounting, for both time and money. The daily planner could be cataloged as another entry in a long list of nineteenth-century standards: of time, of manners, of language, of weights and measures. 2 Since this instance of standardization involves a consumer product, I am able to tell a more intricate and intimate story about the tension between what is standard and what is individual, or in relation to the daily planner, between form and content. It’s a story of agency and innovation, an abiding lesson that sociologist John Storey calls “situated agency” or “active complexity.” A customer’s interaction with his or her daily planner is nuanced, purposeful, and eccentric, even when inscribed in the most

4

Introduction

standard of forms. The history of the daily planner frees us from the unnecessary binary of thinking of mass consumption as either manipulative or empowering. This genre of diary keeping, a practice that evokes most strongly “the cultures of everyday life,” can be democratic and restrictive at once, depending on the user and his or her vantage point. 3 What is especially ironic about the rise of the daily planner as a standard form is the way in which it could foreground the individual by replacing the customary and local, as in kinship networks, with standardized forms that allowed for commerce with strangers. It is, in part, this transition from the local to the standard that I am tracking and its impact on the customers who lined up to buy the daily planner. Nevertheless, I cannot tell this story of the commercial standardization of the diary without the themes of time and money. Aside from serving as critical prompts for diarists, time and money were intricately linked to the introduction and increasing popularity of this material object. Literary historian Stuart Sherman, among others, has already connected the rise of daily genres such as the diary and the daily newspaper with the move toward mechanical time, a shift well underway in England by the opening of the eighteenth century. Indeed, Sherman uses as a model the diaries of the renowned Samuel Pepys, writing from 1660 to 1669, to demonstrate the strong connection between diary time and clock time. The clock, as Sherman explained it, offered British subjects a “new experience of time as it passed,” a process that ran parallel to the production of serialized texts such as diaries, periodicals, and daily newspapers featuring “new installments at regular daily intervals.”4 The technologies, one written, one mechanical, were mutually reinforcing and instrumental in the way they helped users conceive of and tell time. I seek to complicate this connection and suggest that the two, clock and diary, did not always—or simply—work together but could often be at odds. For instance, some customers preferred the daily pace of the diary to the fi ner, and faster-paced, increments of the clock. For them, their lives did not yet demand the precision of the clock’s face; they only needed to know what days to head to school or to church. In this way, the diary could just as readily move users away from modernity even in the tumultuous, modernizing decades following the Civil War, connecting them to a more traditional way of seeing and conceiving of time astronomically as early Americans did with the assistance of their almanacs. I look continually to the way the daily planner informed and shaped the temporal consciousness of its customers. The daily planner’s pages re-

Introduction

5

veal how stuttered and inconsistent the march toward mechanical time could be and attest to the persistence of alternative modes of timekeeping throughout the nineteenth century even as clock and watch sales climbed. Customers did not just look to their daily planners to tell time, they also used them to determine how much money they had. In fact, the only reason some customers owned a daily planner was to record expenses and keep track of how much money they had until payday, at least initially. Money, as much as time, was a strong impetus for such diary keeping, but the connection between diary and money runs especially deep and calls to mind the persistent metaphor of “keeping account,” a phrase most associated with the Protestant tradition of diary keeping that called upon the faithful to keep a daily account that tracked their spiritual progress toward salvation. I am interested in the ways this spiritual and literal account keeping translated to the pages of a daily planner where the format and purpose was dictated by commercial manufacturers more intent on making sales than preserving a tradition of spiritual accounting. 5 Nevertheless, I found both kinds of traditions, of fi nancial and spiritual accounting, equally resilient in the pages of this commercial object that prioritized the needs of this world over the next. Placing the daily planner, arguably an unremarkable product that elicited unremarkable entries from customers day after day for years on end, at the center of my story allows me to celebrate and call attention to the quotidian. This is not then a story of great or famous American diarists. There are few recognizable names. These diarists are easily overlooked both because of what they chose to write in and because of what they wrote. At fi rst glance, both appear mundane, ordinary, and even banal, certainly not worth my time or analysis. But I discovered, to my great relief and delight, that the book and the entries were anything but ordinary. These customers, and also writers in a sense, have much to tell, not only about themselves but also about the power of the daily planner, the beauty of the standard, and the shift in time and commerce in the century leading up to 1900. I began by following Fiske’s Standard Diary back to uncover the daily planner’s early roots as the fi rst American best seller: the almanac. Fiske’s Standard Diary was a direct descendant of the ubiquitous colonial pamphlet perhaps most associated today with Benjamin Franklin’s alter ego “Poor Richard” and his lessons regarding time and money. But what most of us do not realize is that the almanac also doubled

6

Introduction

as a diary and could be considered America’s fi rst daily planner. Aside from providing space for Poor Richard’s essays on money and time thrift, the almanac was most known in its day for its calendar. It was that feature, alongside its interest tables, postal rates, and currency charts, that made it the perfect daily companion for merchants and farmers alike. Booksellers advertised their willingness, for a small sum (of course), to add blank pages to the almanac’s calendar section to ease the conversion of the almanac into a daily diary. And although the practice has received scant attention in studies of the genre, the compulsion was wide enough to draw in more than a few Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who routinely turned their annual editions of the Virginia Almanac into diaries. I also followed Fiske’s Standard Diary forward into the early twentieth century when America’s fi rst advertising men adopted the daily planner to sell everything from liver pills to office furniture. Decades before the debut of the American Express Diary or the New Yorker Desk Calendar, John Wanamaker paved the way to using the daily planner as a branding tool by introducing the Wanamaker Diary, a thinly disguised sales catalog for Wanamaker’s retail empire. In between these episodes of the daily planner’s past and future I situate the larger story about the interplay of customers and producers. Along the way, I realized the daily planner could contribute to a greater understanding of the surge in diary keeping in nineteenth-century America (aside from the usual suspects such as increased literacy, westward journeys, and civil wars), as well as what made people write in the fi rst place. As much as I intended this study of the commercial diary to be about media and consumer history, it simultaneously revealed something critical about the history of diary keeping itself, a cultural practice that took many shapes and forms throughout American history. Historians tend to look to great events like the journeys west or the Civil War as the instigators of countless thousands of diary records: Americans wrote because either they had something to say because they were great men (or women) or because they had something to write about, documenting their travails on the Overland Trail or at the battlefront. And while that may be true, these inclinations came too late to explain a rise in personal record keeping that was well underway by the 1820s and ’30s. Nor do they account for the diaries being written by Americans living in cities and towns all over the Northeast not caught up in these events of great moment. Certainly, expanding educational opportunities for men

Introduction

7

and especially women had a hand in the trend since it gave individuals the requisite skills to put words on a page. But that still does not explain what drove them to account for every day in their daily planners. A product itself of a communication revolution in the early nineteenth century that brought an avalanche of printed matter into American homes including newspapers, periodicals, autobiographies, and novels, the daily planner was one of a variety of readymade blank books designed to save customers from having to make their own records from scratch.6 Job printers, and later blank book publishers, performed the task of ruling and laying out pages and saved customers from having to think about how to arrange the information they needed to set down. They sold account books, weather records, gardening journals, friendship albums, commonplace books, logbooks, time books, and daily diaries (or planners). While many of these blank books came and went as with all fads and fashions, the diary remained a key player in the stock rooms of many blank book men and allowed a few savvy entrepreneurs in the Civil War’s wake to create an industry and build a fortune on the foundation of the daily planner. But they could not have done it without loyal customers. The success of the pocket diary, as it was most widely known due to its portability, rested on the needs of a population in search of ways to manage their time and money. By the time the daily planner was born in the early nineteenth century, few Americans were untouched by an expanding consumer economy that demanded more precise tracking of fi nancial matters.7 Originally conceived as a portable account book and calendar for a merchant or businessman, the commercial diary soon appealed to men and women from all walks of life, as is evident in the inclusive titles some manufacturers coined for the popular annuals, such as Pocket Diary . . . for the Use of Manufacturers, Merchants, Housekeepers, Mechanics, and Professional Men. Countless Americans, then, became regular diarists out of necessity. Answering a need to attend to the practicalities of recording one’s expenses or tracking one’s time, they purchased a daily planner and used it, at least initially, to jot down a shopping list or to note what they paid the washwoman. Soon they were writing more regularly and found the daily habit hard to break and easy to fulfi ll. Their store-bought diaries made it so simple. The page-a-day format kept the days moving forward and never stopped asking for, or expecting, an entry each and every day no matter how mundane. Although it might be tempting to dismiss them

8

Introduction

as account books or engagement calendars, these diary records, like the one that documented more than forty years of family hardship and achievements in the life of Jane Fiske, contain so much more than facts and figures. Even though they might have started with the weather or the sum they spent at the butcher, they never stopped there, often broaching how they were feeling or taking a moment to reflect on their march of days. That is how so many customers became accidental diarists. Recounting the rise and staying power of the daily planner, both from the perspective of its producers and customers, adds to our understanding of why many Americans wrote. Practical needs like accounting for time and money spurred generations to their pens on a daily basis. Just because a customer such as Jane Fiske had nothing to say did not preclude her from participating in a cultural movement of daily record keeping that delivered a sense of order and control in a society that often left her feeling alone and adrift. A commercial diary encouraged writing in ways a blank page could not. It seems a particularly apt lesson in today’s computer age where so much writing is produced in highly structured digital environments of blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. When I fi rst embarked on this project, I found it difficult to connect to the vast literature on diary keeping because most scholars overlooked what people were writing in. I was most interested in the relation between the diary’s format and an individual’s daily insertions while other historians and literary scholars focused almost exclusively on content. In the interest of clarity and brevity, I would divide the diary scholarship into three categories: studies of individual diarists including both literary greats such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and more ordinary folks such as Maine midwife Martha Ballard, studies of groups of diarists such as immigrants heading west or Southern wives during the Civil War, and anthologies that arranged diarists by subject matter rather than by their place in time.8 Many of the anthologies and group studies of diarists were produced in the wake of the women’s movement by scholars writing in newly formed women’s and gender studies programs.9 Such work restored women’s voices and perspectives to the stories we tell about our past. However, these studies of women diarists also had an unintended consequence of leaving audiences with the impression that diaries were written most often by women writing in private about their thoughts and feelings. That wasn’t always the case. American history is peopled with men and women diarists writing for a variety of reasons and in a range of

Introduction

9

styles. Another unintentional outcome of the cumulative work on American diarists is the notion that diaries and diary keeping were always and everywhere the same. That diaries and diarists did not change over time.10 That could not be further from the truth. Using the unconventional vantage point of the daily planner enables me to address some persistent myths about diary keeping in America. Among the myths I hope to dispel: people kept diaries only if they had something meaningful to say; diary writing was a private, often secret, enterprise; only women kept diaries; and diary habits did not change over time. My intention is not to belittle or dismiss an impressive body of work but to offer another perspective that helps correct some of those unintended misconceptions. Although admittedly only a slice of the diary pie, the records produced by Americans writing in a commercial planner lets me attend to what people were writing in as well as what they were writing about. Originally designed for the man about town, the daily planner by the mid-nineteenth century was readily being adopted by women, some who claimed their husbands’ unused planners as their own. Matters as dull as daily expenses could drive people to write as much as their need to express feelings or explore their innermost thoughts. Many of these planners were shared among family members or left exposed on a desk, not locked in a drawer or hidden under a pillow. Because the daily planner has such a long and well-documented history, it also demonstrates that diaries and diarists have a history. Aside from adding to the growing work on consumer and material history, I hope to broaden the way we think about diaries, what they do and the purposes they serve. Oftentimes what people wrote in was as important as what they were writing about, especially if as in the case of the daily planner it was the object itself that kept them writing. The fact that many of these diaries began as account books illustrates how steeped diaries could be in matters of money. Publishers relied on them as a source of steady income, and customers looked to them to manage their money even as they turned to them to tell time. It did not take me long to discover that a need for an accounting and memory aid could inadvertently spark a habit that stuck with many Americans for life. Because the word diary has such strong connotations, I avoided using it in the title of my book. I chose instead daily planner, a modern phrase these early Americans would not have recognized. Some scholars have attempted to distinguish among various kinds of personal records, including making careful distinctions between a diary and journal. To

10

Introduction

some a journal means a purposeful record of entries that tend more toward a confessional literary production, and a diary denotes something that is less systematic yet more personal. Others reverse these defi nitions. Historically, the terms journal and diary were interchangeable and, in practice, the formats as well as their uses overlapped. For the purpose of my story, it is important for readers to appreciate that fans of the popular annual called it a diary or pocket diary. Aside from referring to it as a daily planner or pocket diary, I also will use the terms commercial diary, pocket almanac, or portable account book. I settled on the phrase daily planner to help modern readers distinguish this mass-produced, commercial object from a homemade book of blank pages. A more apt name, something that more accurately describes how customers used it, would have been a daily organizer. Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, few Americans used their pocket diaries as actual planners to note upcoming appointments or engagements. Most were used retrospectively, recording events as they passed. The story of the American daily planner begins in colonial America where the fi rst British settlers carried with them a humble pamphlet hawked by book peddlers and at bookshops in London and across the countryside. From there I follow the daily planner as far as it can go. In particular, the epilogue examines the future of the paper product and asks whether it has one. In an age when digital is king and pen-and-ink technologies including the daily newspaper seem endangered, has the long reign of the daily planner come to an end? But before considering whether the daily planner has reached the end of its road, I want to revisit its long and storied past in hopes of unveiling how it came to be such a crucial, albeit commonplace, tool. It is something we all take for granted, this unassuming assistant we refer to more than a dozen times a day. This unconventional history illuminates the extraordinary perseverance of the ubiquitous calendars, task managers, and daily organizers of today.

Chapter One

The Almanac as Daily Diary

G

eorge Washington made a habit of writing at the top of each page in his diary the phrase “Where & how my time is Spent.” The motto, or mantra, certainly seems in character for a general revered for being methodical and disciplined. Yet the phrase reveals more than Washington’s idiosyncratic quest for order and self-control. His choice of words is symbolic and reflects the way an entire generation of early Americans conceived of and accounted for time. Time’s passage, for Washington and his contemporaries, remained tied to the days on the calendar more than the hands of a clock. Time proceeded a day at a time with few reasons to parse the days more finely than by forenoon, afternoon, and evening and little need to look beyond the present day to set future appointments. Washington’s phrase had more to do with marking the days as they passed, setting them in order and in time. But Washington could not do this without some help. For assistance, he looked to an almanac, or more specifically, to the pages of the Virginia Almanack. In fact, Washington’s diary and his annual were inextricably linked since Washington made his daily entries on blank pages sewn inside the Virginia Almanack. Washington’s diary and his almanac, then, were one and the same. While it is no secret that many of the Founding Fathers were avid diarists, few of their biographers have pointed out exactly what they were writing in. Thomas Jefferson, too, turned to an almanac for a diary, as did many colonists of his generation, both notable and unknown.1 Converting an almanac into a daily diary had roots in the Mother Country, and an almanac was among the fi rst books the settlers of Massachusetts Bay imported into the colonies. When John Winthrop arrived in Salem aboard the Arbella in the spring of 1630, the fi rst governor of Massachusetts Bay carried with him a draft of “A Model of

12

Chapter One

Figure 1.1. A page from George Washington’s diary inserted into his 1771 Virginia Almanack. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Christian Charity,” the opening pages of his journal that would form the basis for his History of New England, and a copy of Allestree’s Almanac for 1620. A decade earlier, Winthrop’s father, Adam, had converted the annual into a diary for his grandson John Jr., so that he might learn the record-keeping habit when he came of age. 2 Although Winthrop and

The Almanac as Daily Diary

13

his Puritan descendants rarely mentioned it, the almanac diary was far more common in British America than the diary of religious examination. 3 It was the daily agenda of the colonial age. By the time Washington chose the Virginia Almanack to set down his daily whereabouts, the almanac diary had assumed a central role in how these early Americans marked their days and made sense of their world. The almanac is key to understanding the full meaning behind Washington’s choice of words. The phrase was hardly accidental and informed by the distinctive conception of time the almanac reinforced. Scheduling events would be difficult, and nearly impossible, without its calendar. How else might Washington or other users know when to be somewhere on a certain day or at an appointed time? For those interested in increments smaller than the day, the astronomical data embedded in the calendar was equally critical since that was how those temperamental clocks remained calibrated. Sociologists have long acknowledged the importance of clocks and calendars for participating in social life. The almanac supplied the “means and ways to ‘time’” their behavior and provided diarists with a framework on which to inscribe their own experiences, moving both outward and inward simultaneously. That structure was much less compartmentalized than today with the “rhythmic beat” of most activities such as work and socializing more attuned to the day and the week than the hour or minute.4 If Washington needed to know what day it was or how many days before the next Sabbath, the calendar alone might suffice. Others achieved more benefits by adding a diary that ordered their past and brought structure to the present. Washington’s mantra indicated a need to order his experiences and exert some control over events that might otherwise feel disorderly and random. 5 Customers would have to wait for products like the nineteenth-century pocket diary that, similar to today’s date books or blank calendars, allowed a user to look ahead and record future events in a preformatted, dated space. The timing in almanac diaries, for the most part, worked retrospectively.6 As prologue, this chapter explains how the almanac served as precursor and instigator of the daily planner. The daily planner would never have come about without the almanac. As America’s first best seller (as popular as the Bible), the almanac had a powerful influence on the way early Americans viewed time as well as money. It’s difficult to account for the great explosion in diary keeping and the rise of the daily planner in the nineteenth century without explaining the groundwork the al-

14

Chapter One

manac diary and its followers laid. From the perspective of its customers, the almanac accustomed them not only to a particular sense of time and its passage but also to a habit of recording that appeared matter of fact and abbreviated yet was rich with meaning. From the vantage point of the printers and booksellers hawking the popular annual, the almanac provided a reliable source of income year after year, even in the worst financial times. Our modern-day view of the almanac is obscured by its folksy legacy: the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Still published annually, the periodical, founded by Robert B. Thomas in 1792, is most renowned for its weather predictions. As soon as the latest version of the Old Farmer’s Almanac hits newsstands every fall, broadcasters take to the airwaves, often highlighting the more outrageous or farfetched of forecasts, such as the year it foretold a “snowy winter” in Las Vegas.7 Although Americans might still peruse its pages to test its predictions or consult the quirkier columns, the almanac has become, for the most part, an antiquated conversation piece. To Washington’s generation, the almanac was neither quaint nor folksy. America’s fi rst president would have a difficult time accepting the almanac’s fall from grace, because for him, and for every colonist who came before him, the almanac was everything. It told him the time, calculated the interest on his loans, directed him to the nearest inns, and entertained him with its poetry. Before even acknowledging its role as a diary, Washington recognized the almanac as an indispensable calendar and local guide. More than many early newspapers, almanacs were a font of local information. They provided readers with the kind of facts needed to negotiate the geographic and commercial terrain of early America. A colonist might turn to a newspaper in search of an advertisement for books or assorted “English Goods,” but he’d turn to his almanac to consult a list of roads from Boston to New York or New York to Philadelphia. He might also fi nd there, when the region’s courts were in session, a list of local officials, coach fares, and currency conversion tables. The almanac enjoyed a status in early America unparalleled by any book, except the Bible. Every colonial household was sure to have an almanac hanging on a peg by the hearth.8 Washington would have agreed with the author who cautioned his customers about the dangers of doing without: “A person without an almanac is somewhat like a ship without a compass; he never knows what to do, nor when to do it.” 9 It’s the

The Almanac as Daily Diary

15

same feeling someone a century later might have experienced without his pocket watch. Even though that analogy may seem farfetched, many eighteenth-century Americans considered the almanac, not the clock, the authority on time. Take away the interest tables, the essays, the recipes, and other features publishers added over time, and the four- by sixand-a-half-inch crudely stitched pamphlet was—at its most basic level—a calendar. The almanac provided a system, a form where none existed. It allowed men such as Washington to fi ll in the blanks rather than make up something entirely on his own. Just as we mark up our calendars today, write out a grocery list, or balance a checkbook, there is a satisfaction that comes with getting things down on paper. However, in this case the uses were prompted by the almanac’s features, many of which came down to time and matters of the pocketbook: listing expenses, recording loans, noting debts, or figuring out how much money until payday. It’s no wonder the almanacs that survive are so fragile. They look as if they had been carried around in a breast pocket or thumbed to near disintegration. Many scribbled sums or recorded a settled debt in the margins. In an advertisement placed in the Virginia Gazette on December 12, 1777, a subscriber offered a $10 reward to anyone who might fi nd his “small red pocket book containing a blank almanack, and the following bills, viz. One twelve pounds of the James river bank, one eight, one six and one five dollar bill, a four and one shilling bill with two parcels of needles.”10 Almanacs became vital personal accessories, as crucial as a hat or coat in foul weather. They were cheap, portable, and compact, a convenient accoutrement for the merchant about town as well as a farmer in the woods. Booksellers in England had promoted the almanac’s suitability as a diary for more than a half-century before Adam Winthrop modeled one for his grandson. From a production standpoint, there were a few methods almanac makers used to aid customers in converting their pamphlets into diaries. If paper was plenty, publishers simply inserted a blank page opposite the calendar for each month, known in the business as “interleaving.” As early as 1565, Englishman Joachim Hubrigh introduced A Blanke and Perpetuall Almanack “designed primarily for the reader to note debts, expenses and other ‘things that passeth from time to time (worthy of memory to be registered).’” Imitators soon followed, with Evans Lloyd adopting another method with his 1582 almanac by offering account pages already “marked off in columns headed ‘L.s.d.’” To

Chapter One

16

save paper others reserved a column on each calendar page for personal notes, though, understandably, it allowed for the scantest of insertions.11 Such almanacs, often called “Blanckes,” offered space opposite the calendar pages for the owner to note debts, expenses, and other “things that passeth from time to time (worthy of memory to be registered).” For the most senior Winthrop, the last directive meant noting who happened to be preaching, as is evident from the following lines lifted from the diary pages of Winthrop’s copy of Allestree’s Almanack: March 8. The Assises at Bury, Mr. Muninge preached before the Juges. March 15. Sr. Jo. Deane & my lady dined wth us. March 25. The year 1620 beginneth. Aprill 17. Mr. Rogers of Dedham preached at Carsey. May 9. Mr. Birde preached at B. & Mde Bacon came to Groton. June 18. Mr. Smyth of ye K. Colledge preached in Groton. My Cosen Jeremy Raven preached at Boxforde on Sonday in the afternoone.12

For others, it meant recording the routines of one’s profession, whether as preacher, farmer, or merchant. Here are the events farmer Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut, chose to memorialize in February 1713/4: Thursd 18 fair. I was at home al day Presing hay. windy. fryd 19 fair. I was at home Screwing hay al day. Saturd 20 fair. I was at home Pressing hay al day.

Remarkably, Hempstead continued in similar fashion for another forty years.13 Such practices followed the day’s conventions and were influenced by the contents of the almanac itself. What someone recorded in his almanac was not so much determined by his personality as the dictates of a formula that was so predictable some almanac makers poked fun at their customers’ entries. One London publisher advertised a 1663 almanac with a “diary” already printed inside with notes such as “the red cow took bull,” “My son John born,” and “The black cat caught a mouse in the barn,” mocking the plain style of the typical diarist.14 Few customers appeared to care about what publishers thought of their entries since hundreds of enthusiasts followed Winthrop’s lead. By the time of America’s founding, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson preferred copies of the Virginia Almanack in which to record

Figure 1.2. The title page of George Washington’s Virginia Almanack, the almanac he routinely chose for his diary. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chapter One

18

their daily memoranda. When Washington arrived in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 without his diary, he wrote his nephew at Mount Vernon and asked for its swift return “under good strong paper cover, sealed up as a letter.” Just in case his nephew did not know where to look, Washington added: “It will be found, I presume, on my writing table.” For Washington, his almanac was critical to his sense of well-being, an essential tool that tracked his daily expenses and the events of his public and private life. Washington, himself, acknowledged as much with his now familiar motto: “Where & how my time is Spent.”15 Nevertheless, even though we might like to think Washington’s diaries more weighty or lofty than those of his contemporaries, his annotated almanacs followed a similar pattern. In the summer of 1771, his almanacs were suffused with the business of running his large estate: July 1. Rid into the Neck to my Harvest People, & back to Dinner. Mr. Robt. Rutherford came in the Afternoon & went away again. 2. Rid to Harvest Field in the Neck & back to Dinner. 3. Rid to the Harvest Field in the Neck by the Ferry & Muddy hole Plantations. In the Afternoon Mr. Jno. Smith of Westmoreland came here. 4. At home all day with Mr. Smith. In the Afternoon Jno. Custis came. 5. Mr. Smith set out after breakfast on his journey to the Frederick Sprgs. In the Afternoon I rid to the Harvest Field in the Neck. 6. Writing the forepart of the day. In the afternoon Rid to Harvest Field at Muddy hole.16

As formulaic and repetitive as Joshua Hempstead’s entries decades earlier, Washington’s record keeping was not unique. One needed to look especially hard to fi nd anything that might distinguish his daily register from the norm, and only if one knew how to read between the lines. For instance, later in the month of July, Washington recorded simply “I set out to Williamsburg,” a remark that meant nothing to the casual reader but indicated to Washington, author of the line, that he was headed to a session of the Virginia House of Burgesses. In another deceptively routine note that same month, Washington wrote that “I remaind at home all day writing my Invoices.” What Washington failed to mention was that these orders were for a quarry of luxury goods direct from London including “a man’s very best Bear. Hat,” a leather portmanteau, saddle, and expensive shoes and boots, purchases he had put on hold due to the colony’s boycotts of British imports.17 But Washington did not need to

The Almanac as Daily Diary

19

spell out the nature of the invoices since he was the one drafting them and producing copies of all his correspondence sent across the pond.18 Even the death of his stepdaughter, Patsy Custis, at age seventeen gets brief mention in Washington’s annotated Virginia Almanac for 1773. The complete entry for June 19 reads: “At home all day. About five oclock poor Patcy Custis Died Suddenly.” Make no mistake, Patsy’s death devastated Washington. But his almanac was no place for the outpouring of such parental grief, which he expressed elsewhere. On the day following Patsy’s death, Washington wrote to Burwell Bassett, laying out the entire, horrible scene for his friend: “yesterday removed the Sweet Innocent Girl into a more happy, & peaceful abode than any she has met with in the affl icted Path she hitherto has trod. She rose from Dinner about four Oclock, in better health and spirits than she appeared to, have been in for some time; soon after which she was siezd with one of her usual Fits, & expired in it, in less than two Minutes without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a Sigh. This Sudden, and unexpected blow, I scarce need add has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery.”19 Still, the tragic event did not disrupt Washington’s almanac habit. Patsy died on a Saturday. Without missing a day, Washington dutifully fulfi lled his own promise to record “Where & how my time is Spent” for the remainder of that month, and beyond. His notes were as straightforward and devoid of emotion as before Patsy’s passing: [June] 20. Colo. Fairfax & Lady as also Mr. Massey dind here—Patcy Custis being buried—the fi rst went away. Mr. Massy stayd. 21. Mr. Massey went away after Breakfast. I continued at home all day. 22. My Brother, his Wife, Miss Reed & Nelly Calvert Dind at Belvoir & returnd in the Afternn. I contd, at home all day. 23. My Brother & Family also Mrs. Reed went away early. I contd. at home all day. 24. Mr. Digges & Mrs. Tracy came here to Dinner also Mr. Hoops & his Wife the latter of whom went away afterwards as did Mr. Digges. Miss Calvert came in the Afternoon. 20

And, as the events surrounding the colonies’ deteriorating relationship with Britain reached a boiling point in the fall of 1774, Washington’s memos remained as bland as ever. Although the discussions among the delegates to the First Continental Congress inside Philadelphia’s Car-

20

Chapter One

penters’ Hall must have felt historic and unsettling for a wealthy planter with so much to lose, Washington betrayed no hint of the drama in the weeks that followed: [Sept.] 6. Dined at the New Tavern—after being in Congress all day. 7. Dined at Mr. Pleasants and spent the Evening in a Club at the New Tavern. 8. Dined at Mr. Andw. Allan’s v spent the Evening in my own Lodgings. 9. Dined at Mr. Tilghman’s & spent the Evening at home (at my Lodgg.). 10. Dined at Mr. Richd. Penn’s. 11. Dined at Mr. Griffen’s. 21

Only the war itself could derail a habit Washington had stuck to every single day for more than a decade. His last entry in his 1775 Virginia Almanac is dated June 19, 1775: “Dined at Colo. Rieds. Spent the Evening at Mr. Lynch’s.” It is, not surprisingly, as unremarkable as the rest. Washington would not resume his personal record until 1781, presumably too busy in his role as commander of the revolutionary army to maintain a daily record. 22 What is so fascinating about Washington’s almanacs is not necessarily what is hidden, or left unsaid, but what is on the page: the things Washington chose to set down on paper. The memos represent the bare minimum, the abbreviations of a life. They put Washington in place, in time, and in company but appear to do little else. Biographers might be tempted to attribute such an obsessive habit to Washington’s character or idiosyncrasies, but that would be problematic since Washington’s diaries looked a lot like those of his contemporaries. 23 The answer to the nature of Washington’s daily note taking lies in the almanac itself. There was a strong connection between the almanac and the writing diarists left scratched inside. We can look to the almanac for clues. Its format acted as a trigger and provided the themes for a diarist’s more personal record. Both time and money figured heavily in the eighteenth-century almanac, and those preoccupations carried over into the blank pages owners fi lled in for themselves. This early chapter in the history of the daily planner also helps us understand what made people write in the fi rst place. It did not always have to do with the spirit, or even with the self. These diarists did not write searching for God or for themselves. They wrote because they had to. Their impulses were more practical and utilitarian. They wrote, like Washington, to keep time or to track expenses. Washington’s record was

The Almanac as Daily Diary

21

both formulaic and ritualistic, following patterns borrowed from the almanac. 24 To understand what Washington and his counterparts were thinking when they picked up an almanac and began to write, we must examine the ephemeral annual in its own time and place. The commercial success of the pocket diary in the nineteenth century had much to do with the genres and record-keeping habits that preceded it. The almanac paved the way for the daily planner. It accustomed buyers to a kind of writing that was regular but abbreviated, coded in a way that was restrictive but instrumental to a way of seeing and being in the world. Premade diaries, one of a variety of other blank books such as scrapbooks, account books, and autograph albums, fueled a publishing industry that betrayed a commercial fervor for cheap print that began in the colonial print shop. 25 Publishing entrepreneurs, those without literary aspirations, in the next century capitalized on new printing technologies to extend a trend that exploited the ready-made diary—like the almanac before it—as a steady source of income that was renewable at the beginning of every year. But there are two sides to this almanac story. On the one hand there were the diarists like Washington or Winthrop who turned to an almanac for a diary rather than relying on the blank page. That decision, as you will see, was significant and consequential. On the other hand there were the printers or publishers, the men literally behind the bookshop counter and figuratively behind the product. They designed the almanac, promoted it, and suggested how their customers should use it. Both sides—buyers and sellers—seemed preoccupied with time and money. It’s that commercial and temporal context of a humble daybook that has not, as of yet, been fully explored. 26 Diaries and diary keeping evolved over time and were steeped, in many senses, in business—in the business of customers and of publishers. *

*

*

If someone today uncovered an old, tattered diary written inside an almanac they might be tempted to dismiss it. With rote phrases such as “clear” or “cloudy” or “I was at home” repeated over and over again, so little of the diarist is revealed, so few secrets offered up. After a closer look at the almanac and the diaries it invited into its pages, the depth and meaning of such documents become clear. They look that way for a reason. They were shaped by convention and inspired by the generic

22

Chapter One

traits of the almanac, a handbook of time and money. But just because their uses betrayed distinct patterns does not mean they weren’t instrumental in the way customers relied on them to order their lives. Inspired by its format and features, a diarist could keep inside the lines or innovate depending on his needs, imagination, and time. This interplay of restriction and innovation is an ongoing theme in this study. Customers embraced a utilitarian and commercial product, reflective of cultural imperatives such as timekeeping or accounting, and found room there for themselves. Buyers often took the object beyond the intentions of the publishers who invented the form. Most almanac users, however, ascribed to a basic formula of record keeping that helps explain why we don’t fi nd language more revealing or evocative. To expect these users to say more is simply anachronistic. Only a handful took the almanac diary beyond its practical role. We must appreciate them on their own terms and in their own time. Even George Washington, a clever general and great statesman, stuck to a well-worn script in the pages of his almanacs. His choice of an almanac for a diary illustrates that such writing was never a lone pursuit. It was interactive, informed and shaped by this early American best seller. To the unaccustomed eye, the content of an early American almanac might look like a hodgepodge, a random array of useful or useless information depending on who was scanning its pages. But to those who could not do without one year after year, and especially those who turned them into diaries, the content was critical and served as a guide to their own additions. The almanac’s features, whether it was an interest table, a calendar, or amusing stanza of poetry, became important prompts for many owners like Washington looking for cues about how or what to write. The form and content of surviving almanac diaries are closely connected and reveal a strong relationship between what the almanac maker provided on the printed page and what an individual added over time with his pen. To understand more about how the unassuming pamphlet shaped what people wrote, we must fi rst examine the almanac’s many features. If one considers the space publishers devoted to certain components, it is easy to deduce the content they considered most important. First and foremost was the calendar. It dominated every early almanac, both in placement and in page count. Almost all almanac publishers reserved an entire page, others as many as two, for each month accompanied by all the astronomical data a customer might need to tell the time by the

The Almanac as Daily Diary

23

rising and setting of the sun or moon. Next, there were the fi nancial tables, also given a prominent place in the almanac’s makeup, often a back page or up front after the calendar. Then publishers fi lled in the rest with poetry, scientific or political essays, road guides, and other matter, often with little rhyme or reason. Hence, colonial publishers assumed that time and money were among the chief concerns of their broad audience, and they responded with a product that answered those needs. The almanac was a mix of old and new and seems an appropriate metaphor for the state of the eighteenth-century American mindset. It was steeped in traditions such as astrology as it introduced new ideas in the realms of science and politics. It could keep a reader abreast of the dates of the Sabbath while instructing him on how to regulate his mechanical clock. It supplied tables of interest for merchants and businessmen even as it continued to predict when farmers should plant. Understanding the almanac is key to grasping why men such as Washington, and a few women, felt compelled to keep such accounts. Aside from being its most prominent feature presented immediately after the title page, the calendar also was the most sophisticated. Although its division of the year into months and weeks was artificial, as it was for all Western calendars, the almanac told time naturally by the movements of the sun and the moon. 27 Typically containing eight ruled columns that displayed an array of symbols and abbreviations, customers needed practice and patience to decipher each monthly offering. The fi rst two columns were straightforward, designating the day of the month and the day of the week in arabic numerals. The third column was the widest and provided weather predictions in italics such as “Expect Snow” or “High winds” and notes of important dates, both religious and political, such as “K. Spain born 1716” or “Epiphany.” 28 The remaining columns were astronomical, indicating the moon’s phases throughout the month and the times of the rising and setting of both sun and moon. Not only were these times helpful for mapping one’s future days and nights, customers presumed—along with the almanac makers—that the calculations could be interpreted astrologically with the position of the moon and stars dictating the state of one’s health, each part of the anatomy corresponding to a different sign of the zodiac. Carried down from the earliest almanacs, an engraving known colloquially as the “Man of Signs” illustrated what constellation controlled which body part: Taurus, the neck; Leo, the heart; Pisces, the feet; and so on. 29 Although the almanac accounted for every day in its calendar section,

24

Chapter One

Figure 1.3. The monthly calendar page of the almanac provided the times of sunrises and sunsets and moon’s phases in addition to other astronomical data that helped customers track time. Author’s collection.

its orientation toward time seemed more occasional than daily with its emphasis on feast days, astrological events, and historic memorials. Intentionally or not, users followed suit, privileging, as diary scholar Stuart Sherman observed, “occasion over continuum.”30 For Hannah Fisher of Philadelphia, that meant recording in her 1794 Bailey’s Pocket Alma-

The Almanac as Daily Diary

25

nac “The greatest Hail Storm, I ever remember . . . it was a solemn time, I took my babe, & went down in the parlour—& sat with the family a number of panes of glass were broken in our sky light.”31 Opposite the May calendar page of his Ames 1740 almanac, Andrew Eliot recorded only those days on which he listened to a sermon. 32 Among a smattering of December entries in his 1799 almanac, shipping merchant Lynde Walter wrote: “25 a dull cold Christmas myself only at Church.”33 Thomas Symmes and his descendants treated a 1696 almanac by John Tulley as some might a cherished Bible, inserting significant family dates of births, marriages, and deaths from 1725 to 1774. 34 While in some respects these writers seemed influenced by the almanac’s tendency toward memorialization, they simultaneously appeared out of step with the dailiness its calendar foregrounded. Limited space may have been one culprit, especially for those who did not spend the extra coin for additional pages. The other reason, according to Sherman, may have been that the almanac did its job of tracking the days so well that users felt they, as a consequence, did not have to. 35 Such users were moved only to fi ll in the gaps. Even for those who, like Washington, managed to answer for every day, the almanac’s limitations meant most diarists never moved beyond mere itemization. Here, once again, are a few lines from Washington’s 1773 Virginia Almanack: [June] 20. Colo. Fairfax & Lady as also Mr. Massey dind here—Patcy Custis being buried—the fi rst went away. Mr. Massy stayd. 21. Mr. Massey went away after Breakfast. I continued at home all day. 22. My Brother, his Wife, Miss Reed & Nelly Calvert Dind at Belvoir & returnd in the Afternn. I contd, at home all day. 23. My Brother & Family also Mrs. Reed went away early. I contd. at home all day. 24. Mr. Digges & Mrs. Tracy came here to Dinner also Mr. Hoops & his Wife the latter of whom went away afterwards as did Mr. Digges. Miss Calvert came in the Afternoon. 36

Despite the dailiness of his entries, the record lacks a feeling of continuity. These appear to be line items, place markers to indicate those incidents each day that were worth mentioning. Time still felt intermittent, there being little sense of the fullness of his days. He fails, as mentioned earlier, to expound on the passing of his dear daughter Patsy. Even while attending the First Continental Congress, Washington feels compelled

26

Chapter One

to write nothing more each day than where he has dined. Under his own heading “How & Where My Time is Spent,” Washington’s purpose is not to offer a textual or serial narration of his life but to itemize his days. His entries are a metaphor for the tower bell versus the pendulum clock. 37 As steady and regulated a genre as it was, the almanac never demanded dailiness and, even when a buyer turned the almanac diary into daily practice, it discouraged expansiveness in its very makeup. The almanac’s design testified to the fact that most early Americans experienced time at a different pace than we do today. While we’re constantly checking the minutes or awaiting the turning of the hour, many colonists were more intent on tracking the days, whether they were occasions or not. This is illustrated most vividly in 1752 by the easy adoption across colonial America of the Gregorian calendar, which shifted the beginning of the new year to January 1 from March 25 and eliminated eleven days from the month of September to align the new calendar with the old style or Julian calendar. Most colonists welcomed the shift, especially merchants compelled to use both calendars in their transatlantic dealings. Only in personal instances did a few colonists cling to Julian dates such as birthdays or anniversaries. “The Day of the Month reminds me of my Birth day, which will be on the 30th. I was born Octr. 19. 1735,” John Adams wrote in his diary. 38 Thus it was the calendar, not the clock, that was critical to the steady flow of American commerce and the coordination of public events. And what was an almanac but an intricate account of those days. That was one reason, among many, that allowed the almanac to preserve its hold as the ultimate authority on all matters of time. Another had to do with reliability. Clocks began as “crude, imprecise, unreliable instrument[s],” and that reputation carried over into the colonies. According to historian David Landes, it took four hundred years to turn the mechanical clock into an accurate timepiece. 39 Despite the fact that clockmakers from Charleston to Boston had plenty of customers, especially among merchants and shopkeepers, that could not make their products any more dependable.40 Clocks required constant tending and meant many clock owners routinely referred to their almanacs to insure their clocks were set to the correct local time. Samuel Stearns added a small paragraph inside the title page of his North-American Almanack . . . For 1774 telling readers how to use his “equation of time” tables in his monthly calendar pages. As Stearns explained it, “On the 15th of April, 16th of June, 31st of August, and 24th of December, the Sun will agree

The Almanac as Daily Diary

27

with all the Clocks and Watches that are true and measure Time exactly even; on all other Days he will be either too fast or too slow of Such Clocks and Watches. . . . N.B. This variation of the Sun from the Clocks and Watches is called Equation, and is set down in sundry Places in each Monthly Page of this Almanack.”41 In another marketing strategy, other almanac makers highlighted the clock’s deficiencies and reminded customers of the superiority of their printed device. Nathanael Low, for instance, claimed in 1786 that the almanac “in fair weather” was “far more sure and regular than the best time-piece manufactur’d here or in London.” Low explained that “twenty gentlemen in company will hardly be able, by the help of their thirty-guinea watches, to guess within two hours of the true time of night. One says it is nine o’clock, another half after eight—a third, half after ten; whilst the poor peasant, who never saw a watch, will tell the time to a fraction, by the rising and setting of the moon, and some particular stars, which he learns from his almanack.”42 Surely many of Low’s customers agreed that the almanac beat the clock as the best timekeeper. Having already established the almanac’s role as rudimentary timepiece, it is easy to appreciate how well the almanac could be adopted to inscribe important events in a person’s life, another sense of time as “occasion.” As a memory aid, the almanac’s temporal features helped put a date and time stamp on one’s affairs. Among the more common inscriptions were those that marked the death of a beloved family member, such as this note written by Hannah Fisher in her Poor Will’s Almanack, for the Year 1798: “my dear Mother departed this life ye 26th of ye 2d mo 1798—2d of ye week about one OC in the morning aged 70 years.” Although she may have been aided by a clock to note the time of death, Fisher surely consulted the almanac’s calendar pages to record the exact day, month, and day of the week of her mother’s passing.43 Fortunately, other almanac owners marked plenty of joyous occasions, a counterweight to the more painful memorials. For instance, just two days after writing that “Abraham Van Baskirk Esq departed this life this day at 3 Oclock PM at WoodChurch farm age 64 Yrs,” Lynde Walter recorded in early June 1799 the arrival of his son “Lynde Marshall” “at 1/2 past 4 Oclock PM.” Of course, the presence of mechanical clocks never assured accuracy, especially in the retelling of significant events. On March 20, 1760, Nathaniel Ames III recorded in his almanac diary that he was “Alarm’d this morning about 4 o’Clock with the Cry that Boston was half burnt up . . . all College up by five. Went to

28

Chapter One

Boston about 9 o’Clock and there beheld a most shocking Sight! nigh 300 Houses consumed by the Fire!”44 Also a student at Harvard at the time, Jeremy Belknap recalled the same scene. In his version, he witnessed “A most terrible Fire at Boston which began (about 1/2 after 1 Clock in ye morning & continued burning till 9 or 10 oclock in ye Forenoon) in the House of Mr James Jackson Merchant in Cornhill & Consumed 34 Houses the wind being very high at NW.”45 Each diarist may have yearned for the precision of the clock, but, in its absence, he resorted to time as told by his almanac. This conjunction of clock time and sun time reflects the era’s in-between-ness. Almanac users may have recognized this new time consciousness, ruled by the clock, but remained wedded to the older notions of time offered in their almanacs. Such dated entries also mirrored the “chronologies” offered up in many almanacs that listed historic occurrences “arranged in order of time from some epochal event—the creation, Christ’s advent, the founding of New England, etc.—or backward from the present year.”46 Opposite a “Brief Chronology of Remarkable Events, relating chiefly to the present WAR” in a 1763 Ames Almanac, Jeremy Belknap added a handful of couplets with a more satirical cast, such as this entry for 1758: “Since Boston Neck was pav’d with Stone & Gravel/The Passengers more easily might Travel.” Belknap turned to more serious incidents on the next page, including “Boston began building 1630 . . . N.York fi rst settled 1615 . . . Peace concld between Eng. Fran. & Spain at Paris February. 10. 1763 . . . Harvard Hall burnt to ye Ground in a terrible NE. Storm Jany 24 1764.”47 In both personal and public affairs, the almanac then helped buyers order the past, providing a literal and serial timeline upon which to place themselves. The almanac also proved more versatile than the clock, addressing all manner of time: past, present, and future.48 It ordered the past in the way it served up chronological tables of historic events or provided a space for marking significant family happenings. It facilitated the present moment by tracking the days in its calendar section. It predicted the future in its astronomical tables or astrological prognostications. Accordingly, a diarist such as farmer Jeremiah Green turned to his almanac to inscribe the date his son was born or determine the best time for planting his corn and, once it was in the ground, simultaneously recorded each day’s weather, tracking “fi ne growing weather for Flowers” or “very dry, rain is much wanted.”49 The almanac told time in many different ways. Only a veteran of the

The Almanac as Daily Diary

29

genre could read the layers and appreciate the variety. Time could feel circular or continuous, depending on one’s vantage point. Even though Washington, the farmer, appreciated the cycles of the planting seasons, he tended to use the almanac more continuously as a daily device. The “day,” after all, is at the root of the term almanac—just as it is for diary and journal. 50 The almanac cataloged every day of the year, with dates, days of the week, dominical letters, and holidays. Time marched forward at a cruel clip, or so some almanac makers seemed to suggest in their own memento mori. 51 Below the April calendar page of Washington’s copy of the Virginia Almanack for 1771, the publisher added this poem: If hours thus count, we may observe from hence Our annual warnings are of consequence; For every time an Almanack thou hast, There’s one year added to the time that’s past, And every diary doth this warning give, Remember, Sir, you’ve one year less to live. 52

Others, more attuned to the cycles of time rather than the publisher’s morbid sense of seriality, consulted the calendar only occasionally to mark a new week or the shifting of seasons. Sundays presented the most common occasion for those who used the rotating Christian calendar contained in the almanac to mark the passage of time. 53 Author Samuel Atkins justified the publication of Pennsylvania’s fi rst almanac in 1686 by declaring that “the People . . . scarcely knew how the Time passed, nor that they hardly knew the day of Rest, or Lords Day, when it was, for want of a Diary, or Day Book, which we call an Almanack.”54 For Atkins’s customers, time may have felt more cyclical than continuous as the calendar ushered them through the same key dates year after year, a sense of time more connected to God or nature. That circular take on time was perhaps more comforting than the serial march since it avoided the question of ends. However, one did not necessarily have to choose one of time’s many senses; users instead rotated among the almanac’s time signals depending on what they were doing or where they were going. In other words, it did not matter so much whether one experienced time as fast or slow or as a circle or a line since the almanac covered all the bases. 55 Nevertheless, time was not all since, as Benjamin Franklin so aptly noted, issues of money were just as critical in the minds of many alma-

30

Chapter One

nac customers. The pair was linked in colonial life as well as in the pages of the almanac. Almanac publishers added tables of interest to help users convert time into money, and users consulted calendars to calculate debts. Posing as Richard Saunders, Benjamin Franklin famously lectured on the relationship of time and money in the 1758 edition of Poor Richard Improved: “If Time be of all Things the most precious, wasting Time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest Prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost Time is never found again . . . Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.”56 Almanac buyers had already made the connection long before Franklin seared the adage of “time is money” into early American culture. Back in England, almanac designers had introduced “blanke” almanacs more than a century earlier “to note debts, expenses and other ‘things that passeth from time to time’” and included a “Table of the Kings” for the dating of leases and deeds since such contracts often used the regnal year. 57 Time had strong links to money and, as a precious commodity, looked forward to those industrial notions that Franklin foreshadowed in which time equaled money. That may have been how Washington viewed his time since he was pulled in so many directions, politics keeping him away from managing his estate for long periods. “How & Where My Time is Spent” may have signaled a recognition that he must spend his time wisely to guarantee a degree of earthly success, whether it be a successful farm or political career. With such intimate connections of time and money, the almanac satisfied customers’ craving for assistance in money matters. By the mideighteenth century, many colonists—merchants, farmers, and increasingly women—were engaged in an expanding web of trade relationships. Demand for consumer goods rose in England and its colonies, and manufacturers stepped up production to meet it. Merchants bought and sold goods near and far. But hard currency was difficult to come by, forcing shopkeepers to accept other means of exchange, such as a cow or bushel of grain. Their suppliers in urban centers or in England, then, had to extend them credit so they might acquire the goods their local customers demanded. Besides instituting an “elaborate barter economy” in villages and towns, the new economy required an expansion of credit for wholesalers as well as their customers. Complicating matters further was a decision by some colonies to print paper money to relieve the specie shortage. 58 Almanac publishers responded by giving their customers instruments to negotiate a very complicated fi nancial terrain, one that

Figure 1.4. Almanacs also provided customers with a myriad of fi nancial tools, including interest tables that could be used to calculate the interest on loans. Author’s collection.

32

Chapter One

became even more complex into the new Republic as hundreds of banks began issuing their own notes. 59 Most common among these features were tables of interest, often printed on the back page of the almanac presumably so users would not have to rifle through the pages in search of the valuable reference. In 1759, Nathaniel Ames offered “A Table of Interest at 5 per Cent. from a Month to a Year,” plus an adjacent table at “6 per Cent.” Ames added a few sentences of instruction to guide a customer unaccustomed to such tools.60 Obviously, tables of interest were most helpful in calculating debt, a chronic concern for even the “wealthiest” of early Americans. For those lucky enough to have some coin in their pockets, almanacs also offered an array of conversion charts to determine just how much those coins might be worth. Never to be outdone by his competitors, Ames announced in the preface to his 1761 almanac the addition of a “Table of the Value of Coins currant in several provinces . . . [and] There is added to this last Table, Value of Grains of Gold and Silver in Old Tenor, from one Grain to a Pennyweight, very handy in this Province.”61 On the back page of a 1780 Continental Almanac owned by Major Caleb Gibbs, a commander in George Washington’s army, was a straightforward table “shewing the value of any Number of Dollars, from 1 to 10,000, at Seven Shillings and Sixpence each.”62 These conversions grew even more complicated after the Revolution, evidenced by a pair of tables printed in Beer’s Almanac for 1799, one “Shewing the value of any number of Cents in Lawful Money, from 1 to 100” and the other “Shewing the value of any number of Pence from 1 Penny to 6 Shillings, in Cents and Mills.” The publisher reserved half of the following page to take customers through the mathematical calculations of converting pounds to dollars and vice versa: If the sum is Pounds only, put a cypher to the right hand and divide by 3; the quotient will be Dollars, and the remainder will be either one or two thirds of a Dollar, that is 2 or 4 Shillings which turn into Cents by the Table.

The lower half of that page offered two more tables, one displaying the value of Portuguese and English gold in dollars and cents and the other the same conversion for French and Spanish gold.63 So long as these values held for a given year it made sense for almanacs to provide such features to its customers. Once private banknotes were added to the mix, however, newspapers adopted the role fulfi lled by almanacs by pub-

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lishing rates of exchange for local and regional notes once or twice a week.64 Following the lead of the almanac’s fi nancial features, the theme of money overran many diary pages. Much of what these writers added had to do with accounting of one kind or another for the purposes of this world or the next. On the most literal level, they used the spaces to track fi nancial accounts. Such accounts could be connected to their livelihoods, such as the tally Jacob Bigelow scribbled at the opening of his 1769 almanac of sums he had earned for preaching or tailor David Brown’s intricate tracking of days he had worked “at Mr. Lord’s.”65 In addition to tracing his whereabouts in prose on the blank pages of Bickerstaff’s Massachusetts Almanack, Brown assembled all of the information into his own “table” with columns marking the days he had worked and the sums he had paid for meals, washing, and lodging. Parson Thomas Balch reserved a page in his 1759 Ames Almanac to record the “cords” of wood he received from members of his congregation that year, a form of “payment” familiar to any eighteenth-century minister.66 In 1759, Jeremy Belknap was disappointed to fi nd that Nathaniel Ames’s almanac only provided customers with interest tables calculated at 5 and 6 percent. Belknap apparently needed a table showing interest calculated at 7 percent. He found one in Gaine’s New York Pocket Almanac for 1758, which he transcribed onto a blank page in Ames’s almanac for 1759.67 Rather than simply a case of brand loyalty, Belknap stuck with the local almanac, since he may have required a listing of New England roads. Others used their almanacs to record debts for services rendered or acquired goods. After all, diarists could carry an almanac diary with them as they bought supplies and note accumulated debts—or credits—as they occurred. Farmer Jeremiah Green listed expenses related to building his house in October 1770. He paid sums “to Capt . . . for Nails . . . To the Glaser . . . to the Mason . . . To the Carpenter to Boards plant &c . . . to diging a Valt . . . To the Painter . . . 150 pd for Clapboards Shingles . . . Saml Peck for Nails.”68 In the same 1759 almanac in which he transcribed a new interest table, Jeremy Belknap also found space to scribble at the bottom of his January diary page “sometime this month—Bought Buckstorf’s Lexicon at Mr. Condy’s [a Boston bookseller].” Condy’s may have been where Belknap purchased his annual almanacs, for the bookseller also peddled the popular pamphlets. Over time, Belknap’s accounting became more systematic as he began to carry over sums from one almanac to the next. Two blank pages at the end of his 1768 almanac became

Figure 1.5. Thomas Balch used a blank page in his 1759 Ames Almanac to itemize the cords of wood he had received from his congregation. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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a makeshift account book, noting at the end of a list of sums that they would be “carried to next year’s almanack.”69 William Barrell, a Philadelphia merchant, appeared particularly relieved to note in his 1766 Ames Almanac that he “Agreed the Washing with Mr. Elford Should Commence the 15th Instant in Consideration of Some Fowl Cloathes.” Reserving two pages in his 1740 almanac for “Mr. Whittemore’s Account,” Andrew Eliot recorded every penny he spent for sugar, candles, butter, and other sundries at Whittemore’s general store. Even Hannah Fisher, as manager of her household staff, needed to appropriate some space in her pocket almanac to record the comings and goings of her domestics. She noted, opposite the August calendar page, that “Black Betty began to work here ye 4th day of the 8th Mo” and “Susan West began to work here the 11th day of the 8th Mo 1794 she had half a dollar sometime in the 9th Mo.” 70 With every table of interest or currency conversion chart, the almanac invited these personal notations of debts owed or wages earned. Such usage was a natural extension of the almanac’s purpose in ordering an owner’s fi nancial world. This sense of spending time also had a strong spiritual dimension, instrumental to the Puritan tenet of self-regulation. As shorthand, diarists pledged to “improve time,” recognizing that God bestowed time and hence it should be painstakingly monitored. As “Christianus” put in The Christian’s, Scholar’s, and Farmer’s Magazine, time “was given us for the purpose of ‘working out our salvation,’ and, as much as fi nite nature is capable, of securing a blessed immortality”; and so, “We must keep ourselves always employed, either in some lawful pursuit, or in our respective callings and occupations.” 71 Accordingly, Priscilla Holyoke, daughter of Harvard president Edward Holyoke, prefaced her 1766 almanac diary with this commitment: How Shall I Spend This Year. I am told by him who cannot err that my time money and understanding are intrusted with me as so many talents for the use of which I must give strict account . . . My faculties & my time should be employed in directing my donation in a plan . . . the most conducive to the Benefit of Mankind the most for the Encouragement of Virtue and the suppression of Vice: To assist in this work is the business of Speach, of Reason, and of Time. These ought to be Employed in seeking out opportunities of doing good.

Holyoke’s entries for that year leave open the question of whether she fulfi lled her heartfelt pledge. There is no mention of ministering to the

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poor or performing good works beyond social visits to kin and neighbors. Rather than record her charity work, she routinely used her almanac to account for expenses such as “Gauze,” “Silver Ribbon,” or a “White Silk Glove.” 72 Whether or not Holyoke adhered to her own advice in her diary’s pages is not really the point. Holyoke, like other customers, believed that keeping this record in her annual almanac helped her account, in a religious and literal sense, for the use of her time. In instructing others on keeping a diary, Cotton Mather advised regularity over effusiveness since “the purpose after all was to record time not to consume inordinate amounts of it.” Puritan founder John Eliot, according to Mather, served as a good model: “He had always been an Enemy to Idleness; any one that should look into the little Diary he kept in his Almanacks, would see that there was with him, No day without a Line.” 73 When Holyoke used the word “account,” she recycled older notions of time reminiscent of Protestant conversion narratives where it meant “to give an account” and where a diary became a “tool for steady self-reckoning.” 74 From this vantage point, time belonged to God, and one risked nothing short of eternal damnation, or at the very least parental disappointment, if one wasted it. After serving as a key instrument of time and money, the almanac proved equally useful in navigating another dimension: space. Diarists looked to their almanacs to set themselves in time and in place. Apart from its more universal features such as the calendar, the almanac was a particularly parochial genre and provided customers with a lay of the land. Almanacs abounded in local data of roads, inns, officials, postal rates, and specie. Even the calendar itself was embedded with local trivia, the rising and setting of the sun and moon calculated according to a region’s geographic coordinates. That is why, you might recall, Jeremy Belknap failed to substitute a New York almanac for Nathaniel Ames’s version even though it lacked a 7 percent interest table. If he had, Belknap would have given up too much information geared toward New England. Belknap may have been lost without it, both literally and figuratively. As was his tendency, Belknap sought to improve on the almanac’s features and added his own statistics that brought his almanac closer to home. In 1767, Belknap accepted the post of minister to a congregation in Dover, New Hampshire, and as a result, reserved a page at the opening of his 1767 almanac (“Calculated for the Meridian of Portsmouth”) to enumerate “The Bearings of Sevl. Places from Varney’s Hill in Dover,” including “Newington MeetgH . . . S 6 E,” “Dover MeetgH . . . S 17 W,”

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and “Long Hill, Dover, Summit . . . N 72 W.” Taking the local a step further, Belknap, opposite a list of New Hampshire roads in his 1770 Ames Almanac, drew an aerial view of his own vegetable garden with notes to identify the plantings, such as “kidney beans 3 rows,” “Best Winter Squash 1 row,” “Inferior Winter Squash,” “Musk Melon,” “Bush beans 5 rows,” “Watermelon 1 row,” “Corn, Pumpkins & Beans,” and “cucumbers 4 Rows.” 75 The almanac could not get much more intimate than one’s own backyard. Some almanac publishers went beyond local data and provided instruction on the latest scientific discoveries or their take on the larger political issues of the day. In his 1697 almanac, John Clapp ruminated for ten pages on the new sun-centered Copernican system of planetary motion. Almanac author “B. A. Philo-Astro” did it in twelve pages. In 1759, Nathaniel Ames put a diagram of “The Solar System” on his title page and supplemented it with a two-page explanation after the almanac’s calendar section. Ames advised his readers to rely not on their senses but on science: “To the naked Eye, the Aether, appears like a solid Arch, the Stars like the Heads of brass Nails, the Sun flat and about as big as a Chease, but our reason informs us better.” 76 By the 1760s, some almanac makers began to foment dissent, as America’s relationship with England grew strained. In the midst of the debate over import taxes, Nathaniel Ames Jr. added a few pointed phrases to the usual predictions in his 1765 almanac: “It is better to wear a homespun coat, than to lose our LIBERTY,” and “It’s time to think of raising Hemp & Flax, if we’ve a Mind to save a Tax.” When the dreaded Stamp Act was repealed, many almanac writers celebrated their escape from “slavery.” 77 Of course, customers also bought almanacs for their own amusement. “Entertaining” was one-half of a successful equation most almanac publishers promoted. American almanac makers by the eighteenth century adhered to an informal creed that their publications would be simultaneously “useful and entertaining.” The creed was so common, in fact, that Robert B. Thomas adopted the phrase for the title page of his Farmer’s Almanac when he began publication in 1792 and never removed it.78 Rather than create their own material, however, publishers made a habit of “borrowing” from others so that many almanacs today read like an Enlightenment Readers’ Digest. Nathanael Low chose a few lines from Pope from “Argos, Ulysses’s Dog” to fi ll the extra pages of his 1770 almanac. Nathaniel Ames, before trying to go it alone, prided himself on providing scraps from English authors, such greats as Addison,

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Thomson, Dryden, Butler, and Milton.79 Almanac makers preferred to regurgitate the classics, perhaps because readers could sting when they tried to make it up on their own. Addressing readers in the preface of his 1761 almanac, Ames announced his intention to “decorate” his pamphlet with “poetry of my own composing.” Rather than celebrate such a stroke of originality, Jeremy Belknap, a Harvard theology student at the time and faithful Ames customer, reserved an entire page interleaved in that very almanac to respond to Ames’s project. One could almost “hear” Belknap shouting: Fie, Doctor, I’m ashamed of you to print such a Sentence as this in your almanack,—Decorate the almanack, Doctor, This beats all Nature, Decorate the almanack with Poetry of your own composing, It seems you have a great opinion of your self to think that Poetry of your composing can decorate an almanack, I’ll assure you your opinion is wrong, Doctor, for all of Poetry that you ever made, if it be like this, can never decorate but disgrace your Almanacks.

Belknap proceeded to edit each and every poem Ames printed at the top of each calendar page. Rather than strike out words or replace with his own compositions, Belknap provided a running commentary in the margins with such observations as “false grammar,” “very poor sense & worse poetry,” and “where’s the ‘midnight way,’ Doctor Nonsense.”80 So, while almanac makers continued to produce material that was amusing, they did so at their own peril, occasionally provoking the wrath of their more educated clientele. Belknap’s virtual conversation with Nathaniel Ames illustrates how interactive, and personal, a customer’s relationship with his almanac could be. The almanac served as roadmap, a starting point, and customers had the ability to take its cues in many directions, many of them unanticipated by the men who published them. Belknap, Washington, and countless others used the formulaic elements of an almanac to create a unique, individual self. And because the almanac doubled as a diary, the almanac could help display as well as create that unique identity. Belknap was one of a handful of diarists who, despite the severe restrictions of space and the dictates of convention, left a very personal record. Yet there is another who deserves mention, who pushed at the boundaries of the format and created a document unmatched in wit, charm, and duration. By all accounts, Aaron Wight, a country doctor, was an odd

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duck, remembered in published histories of Medway, Massachusetts, as an “eccentric.” One resident recalled how Wight, after having his leg amputated without anesthesia, took out his violin and played a tune to show his mettle.81 While Wight may have been tough, that is not the side of his personality that comes across on the pages stitched in forty-three years of almanacs. From 1769 up to his death in 1813, Wight was fanatically faithful to his record, never missing a day if only to note “clear” or “cloudy.” Although remarkable in its span and regularity, something else besides his prose sets Wight’s diary apart. It’s the drawings. Wight sprinkled the margins with his own pictures. There wasn’t much he would not draw: babies, calves, a new hat, a bloody tooth. He even depicted what few could capture—a gust of wind or a sweltering day. Although a grown man, Wight played with the pen like an observant four-year-old eager to put on paper the things he encountered each day. There are certainly more dignified ways to identify Wight. Born in 1742, Wight was a fi fthgeneration descendant of an immigrant founder of Medfield, Massachusetts. He was a war veteran. A physician. A farmer. A church member. A husband. A father. Yet it is his pictures that stand out in the long diary record that spans more than four decades of his adult life. The drawings, even the most morbid ones, betray a sense of whimsy and lust for life amid intermittently hard times.82 Wight’s drawings do not substitute for words but rather enhance his entries. In fact, Wight divvied up the interleaved pages of his almanacs in the same style of his contemporaries. He wrote little more than a line a day and listed the days of the month along the left-hand edge of the page. He even used some of those common phrases almanac satirists mocked, such as “My Cow Took Bull.”83 However, next to that oft-used phrase, Wight added a small drawing of that bull, a crude but unmistakable likeness. When a neighbor or loved one died, Wight drew a coffi n in the margins. After a successful delivery, he penned a tiny baby next to that entry. Many of Wight’s drawings may have served as an index, shorthand to tally up the routines of his profession. Were Wight to leaf through a previous year’s almanac, he could easily count the number of babies he delivered that year or enumerate the dead without having to read his handwritten notes. Like others whose entries revolved around business, Wight’s doctoring took center stage in his diary. When Wight sketched a small picture of an infant into his diary he added a “B” or a swirling “G” to de-

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note the baby’s sex. He was always on the move—to Andover, Medfield, Sudbury—attending to patients or receiving them in Medway. Wight listed their names as if opening a medical chart with the brief diary entry: “Mrs. Hastings came to be Doctrd . . . then David Holbrook Came to be Doctrd . . . then David Holbrook went home.”84 There were few other procedures Wight could represent through pictures, however. Although he did offer a rendering of a bloody tooth when he pulled his daughter’s fi rst one, Wight thankfully recorded no drawings of broken arms, severed toes, or festering ulcers.85 Even if he didn’t draw them, Wight was attending to all of these kinds of ailments. In February 1770, Wight noted the arrival of Widow Ball whose “canser” Wight cut out, not once, but twice. Over the next several months, Wight dutifully recorded Widow Ball’s fluctuating condition in addition to her visitors. By April, things did not look good for Widow Ball, for Wight wrote on the seventeenth: “cloudy———then rote Widow Balls will.” Widow Ball managed to hang on until the fall when Wight closed her medical record with a simple entry: “17 Cloudy Widow Ball Died.”86 To the brief entry, Wight added a small picture—a tiny black coffi n. Apart from these visual additions, Wight’s usage mirrored that of other almanac diarists. His diaries serve as accounts of expenses, of his medical practice, and of his time. Many of the drawings mark Wight’s consumption, major purchases accompanied by a pictorial rendering. Doctor, farmer, and amateur clock maker, Wight was also a bit of a dandy. Or, at least, he cared enough about a new pair of shoes, a suit, or a wig to scrawl a little drawing in his diary. Or perhaps it was just an appreciation for fi ne things. He also memorialized the purchase of a new “saddel,” a “Black mair,” and a black “Chays” (chaise) with his tiny, often comical, sketches.87 Sometimes Wight’s purchases had a more practical purpose. In July 1772, he “bought Doct Pratts Case of instruments” for his medical practice. Later that same year, he acquired a new fishing rod to use at Seth Allen’s pond.88 Pictures of clocks also adorn many pages of Wight’s diaries. Perhaps as a sideline, Wight loaned himself out to the community as clock maker and watch repairman, or at least that is how it appears from his diaries, which are sprinkled with references to anything with a second hand. Wight’s clock entries reflect his connections to commerce as well as a new sense of time-consciousness. Clock making may have been just a hobby for Wight, but it surely engendered in him an appreciation for mechanical precision that an almanac could not provide. After the death of

Figure 1.6. Aaron Wight sprinkled the pages of his almanac diary with drawings, as he did on this page to document the construction of his house and his wife’s death in childbirth. Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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his second wife from fever, Wight wrote: “26 Clear then my wife Died afternoon 20 M after 5.” He could not have recorded the time of death with such precision without a clock, and yet Wight chose to memorialize it in his almanac. The clock references in his diary are easy to spot because most are paired with a picture, oftentimes intricate enough to detect the separate links of the watch fob. Wight’s clock turnout was not large, nor swift. He was lucky to complete three clocks in a year. In 1771, he noted in March that he had “Begun to make the First Brass Clock.” A month later, he delivered a clock to Mr. Joseph Rider. In August, he wrote “Jesse Adams had the Clock Augst ye 27,” indicating another successful delivery or loan.89 For a fee Wight would also clean, repair, or set clocks. Because there weren’t likely to be many people in Wight’s community who could afford such luxuries, Wight continued to rely on his doctoring as his primary source of income. There are other entries—and drawings—in Wight’s almanacs more difficult to categorize. The subject matter is more personal and reflects Wight’s level of self-awareness in an age of rising self- consciousness. Wight lost his fi rst wife, Mary Kittredge, to childbirth in June 1772 when she was only twenty-three. Wight used the pages of his diary to recount his quest to fi nd a new companion, not an easy task. After several failed attempts at fi nding his daughter “Polly” a new mother, Wight recorded “an Extrordnery Event” in the fall of 1775. It was on that day that a new patient “came to be Doctd.” Her name was Jemima Rutter, also know as Mime or Mima.90 A few days later, after an excursion to Medfield with Mime Rutter, young Polly Wight, and Wight’s sister, Thankful, Wight wrote: “26 Clear How well they agree.”91 Wight had fi nally met his match. He couldn’t resist jotting a little sketch in the margin. It depicts a man and a woman standing opposite each other clasping hands as if poised to dance, a dog sitting obediently in the background. In short, a pastoral domestic scene. Mime became Mrs. Jemima Wight in January 1776.92 Jemima and Aaron Wight had ten children, seven girls and three boys, all of whom survived into adulthood. Jemima remained at her husband’s side until his death in 1813 at seventy-one. They are buried side by side in a grassy plot in the West Medway cemetery.93 Thanks to Wight’s diaries, and especially his drawings, we feel as if we know much more about the character buried there. Wight’s vernacular drawings represent many things. They mark consumption, the seasons, and family events. They do more than enhance the prose entries; they personalize them, leaving more of Wight on the

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page than words alone could do. More than an account of consumption or of time, Wight’s diaries represent an account of self. As short as his entries are and as generic as some of his drawings might be, they offer us a glimpse of the man. Not just a record of business, his pictures betray heartfelt emotion and a penchant for fi ne things. Although much of Wight’s style reflected the conventions of other diarists who turned to almanacs for their daily entries, his record keeping went beyond the period’s norm. Wight’s record anticipated a time when diarists, with a greater level of self-consciousness, turn to printed forms to insert themselves. Prompted by all of those impulses that drove others to their diaries, Wight took his account a step further. More than just fi nancial, religious, or temporal reckoning, Wight’s diary represented a performance of self.94 Defying the impersonality of the ubiquitous pamphlets, Wight transformed his almanacs into an extended statement of his own identity. Day by day, he interacted with his almanac and produced a depiction of his character, separate and apart from his association with community, family, or church. He played with the printed page. The almanac offered engravings; he responded with pictures. It offered fi nancial tables; he inserted his accounts. It gave him the time; he overlaid his own. Wight’s usage underscored how well a match the almanac and diary keeping could be. Yet setting Wight’s extraordinary record aside, it did not matter whether one’s diary was expressive or prescribed. The almanac and diary remained inextricably linked, and the marriage provided both practical and psychic benefits. The practical meant serving as handy account book or personal timekeeper. The diary began where the almanac left off: as time and account keeper, spiritual regulator, and memory aid. The psychic benefits are more difficult to appreciate since they were not always as evident on the page, except perhaps if we return to Washington’s daily motto of “Where & How my time is Spent.” Although others did not put it into words, those daily entries lent a sense of order to a seamless march of days and suggested one could harness time for one’s own ends. *

* *

Benjamin Franklin is arguably the most famous almanac maker of early America. Franklin’s annual, based on the character of “Poor” Richard Saunders, is renowned today for its popularity and enduring aphorisms,

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such as “time is money.” Although perhaps more obscure to audiences today, Nathaniel Ames of Boston was as successful as Franklin in building a popular almanac brand. While Franklin satisfied the mid-Atlantic market from his base in Philadelphia, Ames cornered New England. Introducing his fi rst almanac in 1726, beating Franklin’s entry into the market by five years, Ames bragged that he could sell 60,000 almanacs in a given year. Whether or not one believes such claims, Ames’s output was at least as brisk as Franklin’s, whose titles often warranted several printings and approached 10,000 copies in a single year, according to Franklin’s autobiography. No matter who sold more almanacs, Franklin and Ames each built two powerful and lucrative dynasties. Almanac publishers liked to poke fun at one another and manufactured fictional rivalries in the pages of their almanacs. However, putting those tongue-in-cheek jabs aside, Franklin and the Ames clan took the almanac very seriously. As their own almanac tales tell, both would do just about anything to insure their almanacs endured. Their stories are as important as those of their customers in understanding how the almanac diary came to be. A man like Washington did not wake up one day and say to himself: “I think I’ll turn my almanac into a diary.” Almanacs, and the diaries contained within them, did not simply arise from personal need. These name brands grew out of a fiercely competitive marketplace where printers searched for features that might set their products apart. Almanac makers had a hand in promoting a record-keeping trend that became a cultural habit. It was a convention that was nourished for decades by printers and publishers eager to build and sustain a market for the products that came off their presses. Mapping that parallel course of the almanac producers is critical to understanding how readily the market for blank diaries expanded in the nineteenth century. There is a direct correlation between the almanac makers and the diary producers who succeed them. Their imperatives were similar. Each sought to create a product that was useful, portable, and yet temporally fi nite, compelling a buyer to purchase a new version every year. Nevertheless, within those broad parameters, diary manufacturers satisfied those imperatives differently. For now, let us focus on how the printers of Franklin’s and Ames’s generation pitched their product. At the opening of a fair summer day in 1764, Nathaniel Ames III, son to almanac maker Nathaniel Ames Jr., awoke to a “most shocking scene,” recording later in his diary that “my Father died at 6 o’clock this Morning.” It was a poignant entry, to be sure, one that hinted at the unexpect-

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edness of his father’s passing as well as its import for the close-knit clan. But the significance of the notation, penned by Ames on a blank page inserted into one of his father’s famed almanacs, was not just personal. The event had repercussions far beyond the author’s hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts. By the end of that week, Ames’s death had sparked a publishing crisis in Boston. With Ames lying in his grave, just about any printer might claim to continue the venerable tradition Ames had cultivated. Printers had passed off pirated editions of Ames’s almanac before, and there was little now to stop them from issuing an imitation. Almanacs generally sold for five to six pence apiece—about a dollar in today’s currency.95 At 60,000 copies annually, printers of Ames’s almanac could rely on a comfortable income and subsidize their less profitable pursuits such as book publishing.96 The younger Ames’s brief diary entry touched off an intense scramble among Boston’s printers over who would inherit Ames’s dynasty. Luckily, Ames’s son understood from the outset how much was at stake and would not allow some imitator to lay claim to his father’s name. Keeping such a valuable asset in the family meant doing the work of compiling the almanac himself. Barely a month after his father’s death, Ames wrote that he was “much engaged in calculating eclipses.” Two weeks later, Ames noted that he’d received a letter from Boston printer Richard Draper, “re Almanack.” Bookseller and publisher of the Boston Weekly News-Letter, Draper, along with a small consortium of Boston printers, had controlled the publication of Ames’s almanac since 1761 and hoped to maintain his hold on the valuable imprint. Draper scolded the younger Ames for not stopping to see him the last time Ames was in Boston, and wondered whether he had decided to accept Draper’s offer to publish next year’s almanac. Draper warned the grieving son that if they did not move quickly Nathanael Low’s almanac would be “in the Press . . . before the Printers have a Chance of publishing yours.” What’s more, if Ames agreed to his terms, Draper promised to erase the debt his father owed him and pay him “L20 lawful Money—a Sum larger than ever expected by your Father.” Ames agreed, though he failed to meet Draper’s deadline of September 1. As late as September 10, 1764, Ames recorded in his diary that he was “preparing aD[d]ress for the Almanack” and “carried the Copy of the Alman[ack]” to Draper on September 13. The printer made quick work of it, getting it to press in a week’s time.97

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By acting quickly and decisively, Ames’s son held onto his father’s legacy, and profits, for at least another decade. Ames busied himself each summer with calculating for the almanac and even scolded himself once for not beginning the work sooner “so that I may have time to fi ll up with useful & entertaining things.” He then spent the fall shopping the copy around to various printers in hopes of sparking a bidding war, and often he did. The year after his father’s death, Ames took the almanac away from the printing consortium Draper headed and gave the business to a higher bidder, William M’Alpine. Draper did not take kindly to Ames’s antics and hired Benjamin West to produce an Ames “brand” for 1767, which would include Ames’s valuable name in the title. When confronted by Ames for the affront, the printers played dumb, claiming they had no idea Ames had decided to continue publishing his father’s almanac. In 1768, Ames returned the business to the consortium, and, this time, M’Alpine retaliated with his own counterfeit edition. And on it went, for the next several years.98 Such fevered competition mirrored Franklin’s experience in Philadelphia where rival printers routinely accused one another of stealing material or spreading falsehoods to increase almanac sales. Franklin was no innocent in this regard. He appeared to revel in such schemes no matter how facetious. In the preface to his fi rst edition of Poor Richard, Franklin predicted the death of almanac-maker Titan Leeds who “dies, by my Calculation made at his Request, on Oct. 17. 1733. 3 ho. 29 m. P.M. at the very instant” and timed the introduction of Poor Richard to the demise of “my good Friend and Fellow-Student . . . whose Interest I was extreamly unwilling to hurt.”99 In the almanac of the following year, Saunders reported that his friend’s death was confi rmed by the appearance in a rival publication of a Titan Leeds who called Saunders “a Fool and a Lyar.” This Leeds must be an impostor, reasoned Saunders, since the real Leeds adored Richard and would never have called him such names. Leeds never did set the record straight and lived several more years, until 1738. Even then, the Leeds gag continued with Franklin and his rivals substituting in Leeds’s ghost in their ongoing publishing wars. The satirical cast of these exchanges makes one question: just how serious were these rivalries. Serious or not, they encouraged almanac sales for Franklin as well as his competitors. Such almanac battles were often serialized in almanac prefaces from one year to the next and meant readers had to have purchased the previous year’s almanac to understand the insults hurled in the next issue.100

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Although Franklin entered a very competitive market, he did very well for himself, beating the veterans at their own game. Franklin built Poor Richard into his most profitable publication aside from his newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette.101 Not only did Poor Richard provide Franklin with his most enduring legacy, the humble pamphlet that Franklin routinely compiled from the work of others was, by the printer’s own admission, a virtual cash cow. “I endeavour’d to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such Demand that I reap’d considerable Profit from it, vending annually near ten Thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any Neighbourhood in the Province being without it,” Franklin recalled in his autobiography.102 It was the preface to his 1758 Poor Richard Improved that would bring Franklin the most fame. Despite the fact that Franklin borrowed liberally from others in constructing the address that celebrated the values of “Frugality” and “Industry,” the piece forever cemented Franklin’s authorship of the legendary harangue titled “The Way to Wealth,” repackaged and reprinted in dozens of venues into the nineteenth century.103 After Franklin decided to retire from the printing business and leave the running of his operation to his partner David Hall, Poor Richard remained popular, as Franklin attests in a letter sent to Hall from London in the spring of 1760. “I think you have done very well with the Almanacks,” Franklin wrote, “I see there are others advertis’d; but doubt not Poor Richard will hold his Ground.”104 Indeed, even the American Revolution, the death knell of many publishing ventures due to the scarcity of paper and disruption of distribution networks, failed to derail the annual publication of Poor Richard. The almanac of Richard Saunders held on into a new century, ending publication in 1801. Back in New England, Ames’s heirs could not claim the same distinction since that region’s most popular almanac did not survive the revolution.105 Nonetheless, there’s no arguing that the Ames brand had staying power amid challenging times, lasting another fi fteen years after the senior Nathaniel’s death in 1764. By 1780, Ames’s competitors had fi nally gained the upper hand. Sometimes as early as September, printers began running advertisements in the local papers announcing the publication of next year’s almanac. They might be brief, as in the teeny ads in the Boston NewsLetter or Boston Gazette that read “Just Published . . . Ames’s Almanack for the year 1767,” or “Ames’s Almanack for 1769, is now in the Press, and will shortly be published, and Sold by the Printers and Booksell-

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ers in Boston, and Traders in the Country.”106 Or they might be lengthy, as when John Mein used an entire column in an October 1767 issue of the Boston News-Letter to enumerate the contents of Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack, just published and for sale at his London bookstore on King Street. If a buyer was so fortunate to choose Bickerstaff’s annual, according to Mein, he might fi nd: eclipses; a calendar; courts for the four provinces of New England; the sun’s rising and setting; the high water at Boston; the moon’s place; “all the principal roads on the continent of North-America, much more correct than any hitherto published, with the best Taverns to put up at”; and, as if that was not enough, “a General View of the Whole World, Containing, in alphabetical Order, Names of the several Empires, Kingdoms, States, Provinces . . . A Chronological Table Of the Discovery of the Arts and Sciences, interspersed with remarkable events since the Deluge . . . Act of Parliament for regulating the Post-Office . . . An Account of the Causes of popular Disease . . . The affecting Adventures of a young English Officer among the Abenakee Indians” and much, much more.107 Perhaps Ames’s ads were small because the printers felt his pamphlet so popular it sold itself. As mentioned earlier, publishers invoked the mantra of “useful and entertaining” to sum up their almanac’s benefits. In introducing the Poor Richard series in 1733, Franklin told readers they could console themselves that they were additionally “performing an Act of Charity, to his poor Friend and Servant” in purchasing Saunders’s “useful Utensil.”108 Others went on the offensive, attacking a competitor’s calculations and claiming their data more complete or more accurate. Both Ameses, father and son, had to defend themselves against these critics. The senior Ames ran a lengthy advertisement in the Boston Gazette in January 1760 attacking those responsible for a shoddy counterfeit edition of his almanac. The almanac, according to Ames, was a disgrace, omitting elements crucial to a text designed to be “of Service.” The “base” edition lacked a preface, ephemeris, interest tables, and lists of roads and stages, among other key elements. Ames knew what his rivals were up to.109 He claimed that their “Chief Design was . . . to destroy the Credit my Almanack has gained, and prevent its having such Credit in the Future.”110 Ames’s counteroffensive apparently worked, for he and his almanac continued to command a huge audience by early American standards. In a publishing and print world that emphasized a few old favorites, the focus here seemed to be on novelty within an accepted template. Franklin was especially good at claiming novelty when he was sim-

The Almanac as Daily Diary

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ply following the well-worn path of predecessors. In his autobiography, Franklin left readers with the impression that he invented the notion of weaving proverbs into the free columns of the calendar: “I consider’d [Poor Richard] as a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, who bought scarcely any other Books. I therefore fi lled all the little Spaces that occur’d between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences.”111 If printers were to set their products apart, they, like Franklin, stressed new features or additional pages. In 1740, Franklin went so far as to claim that his almanac for that year “may be a Means of saving the Lives of Thousands.” A reader would have to consult the fi ne print to realize the claim was based solely on the addition of a recipe for “Dr. Tennent’s infallible Method of Cure in the Pleurisy of the Seneka Rattle-Snake Root.”112 Nearly a decade later Franklin increased the price of his popular almanac and justified the hike by adding twelve pages to the calendar. Renaming his annual Poor Richard Improved, Franklin explained, “The Almanack us’d to contain but 24 Pages, and now has 36; yet the Price is very little advanc’d.”113 Selling more almanacs often meant appealing to a particular, yet influential, subset of their clientele: women.114 In 1741, Franklin distinguished one of his annuals by its size rather than its length, introducing “an Almanack so small, as that it may be carried conveniently in a Corner of thy Pocket-Book.” Aimed at his female customers, the gimmick reflected the era’s propensity for everything miniature. Franklin streamlined the contents to fit, and “To oblige thee the more, I have omitted all the bad Weather.”115 In 1750, when Lord Chesterfield scolded his son for the poor state of his penmanship, he wrote, “Your handwriting is a very bad one, and would make a scurvy figure in an office-book of letters, or even a lady’s pocket-book.”116 That, of course, was still in London. Nevertheless, by the 1770s almanac makers in most American colonies, including Virginia, began publishing almanacs expressly for “the Ladies.”117 Another way Franklin and his counterparts could charge more for their almanacs was by adding blank pages to the calendar section so that their customers might use it as a diary. In 1741, Franklin sent printer William Bradford in New York a dozen almanacs and charged him a halfpenny more for the interleaved copy than for the plain version. Bradford would likely add another ha’penny or more to the retail price for those customers wanting the extra pages.118 Only on rare occasions did booksellers actually use the term interleaving in their almanac adver-

50

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tisements. Perhaps it was a practice so common that it did not require mention.119 Bookseller Hugh Gaine, also in New York, chose to highlight the almanac’s record-keeping function in his effort to sell the Pocket Almanac for 1758. Gaine advised his customers to order their almanacs early, for “Many Gentlemen were disappointed of the Use of this Almanack, for the Year 1757, by their not sending for the same in Time: ’Tis therefore requested that they wou’d be less dilatory this Year. It is properly interleaved with fi ne Paper, on which Memorandums may be made for every Day in the Year.”120 With almanac compilers perennially complaining about the difficulty of fi nding new material to fi ll pages, what a relief it must have been for men such as Gaine to realize they could just as easily add value, and profit, by stitching in a few pages that were entirely blank. Once the sale was complete, the onus of fi lling those pages fell then to the customer. Although his eyes never strayed far from the entries of the account ledger, Franklin’s appreciation for the almanac was not simply about the bottom line. His correspondence is littered with grateful missives thanking him for sending along the gift of a new almanac. Minister and philosopher Samuel Johnson told Franklin he was “much obliged . . . for . . . the Almanac and my wife for hers.”121 In mid-October 1747, Franklin wrote his mother, Abiah, that “I send you inclosed, one of our new almanacks; we print them early, because we sent them to many places far distant.”122 A few years later, Franklin asked poet Susanna Wright to “Accept an Almanack for the New Year, with my hearthy Wishes that it may prove a happy one to you and your Friends.”123 British botanist Peter Collinson told Franklin in a letter dated March 7, 1754, that he “was well pleased with [the Almanack] for the Sake of the Account of the Jerseys.” Franklin apparently sent the same almanac to his British counterpart Richard Jackson, explaining, “I send you the enclos’d Almanack for the Account it contains of the Increase of People in West Jersey.”124 As if this was not proof enough of Franklin’s respect for the almanac, he wrote his own partner, David Hall, from London in 1757, thanking him for sending along “four Bills of One hundred Pounds Sterling” but adding how “I wish you had sent me a Poor Richard’s Almanack.” Hall did not make the same mistake twice, writing in December 1759 that “Have sent you Poor Richard’s and the Pocket Almanack, and shall be glad if you are pleased with them.”125 The fact that Franklin thought enough of an almanac to bestow one as a gift to such dignitaries as Jackson and Collin-

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son signifies the stock he placed in the ephemeral pamphlet. Like many of his contemporaries, Franklin understood the almanac’s worth. Franklin’s runaway success with his Poor Richard series represented a high-water mark for the almanac in early America. In 1765, partner David Hall sent Franklin a reckoning of accounts from their print shop, which included the sale of 141,257 Poor Richards’s almanacs and another 25,735 pocket-sized versions since 1752. That meant the almanac’s average sales in that decade exceeded Franklin’s estimate of 10,000 a year and accounted for nearly a third of the partnership’s income.126 But those kinds of numbers would prove difficult to sustain. A year after Franklin received news of the heady sales figures from Hall, James Parker, a New York bookseller with whom Franklin also had a partnership, wrote to prepare Franklin for tough times ahead: “In this very dear Place I fi nd it hard to live; having not had 20s. worth of Employ from others since I have been here: only my Almanacks, and 4 other Printers here printing Almanacks also, I shall be well off, to get above a Fifth of the Whole.” Parker’s predictions appeared to come true when he reported that December that he “printed 3000 Almanacks only, and have the Luck not to sell one Half of them: tho’ Holt for Years past, and when I printed before, did 6000, and we never had many left on our Hands, yet I think mine is as good and as much in it as any of theirs.”127 Even the Ames clan was out of the almanac business by the close of the American Revolution, although there were plenty of others willing to pick up the slack. As Parker’s complaint illustrated, it was difficult to maintain the volume of sales that Ames and Franklin had enjoyed in a market increasingly saturated with new almanacs. Soon there would be an almanac, it seemed, for every segment of the population: Farmers, Christians, Freemasons, anti-Masons, Friends, Mechanics, Yankees, Evangelicals, even Temperance advocates. With the emergence by the 1820s of other specialty almanacs devoted to an array of subjects such as health, humor, religion, and politics, the generic, and once universal, almanac was under siege as its market share and cultural relevance became increasingly diluted.128 Even by the time Robert B. Thomas founded his Farmer’s Almanack in 1793, the almanac had begun a long decline. More than market saturation, the almanac began to suffer from a lagging reputation, especially in urban centers such as New York and Boston.129 Although the genre had been the butt of jokes and derided as “fi lthie Almanacks” almost since its inception, the almanac by the early

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nineteenth century had become passé in many circles, realigned by publishers to suit strictly agricultural needs. In the 1820s, the almanac remained the most widely read genre in rural New England counties after the Bible.130 In introducing his Farmer’s Almanack, Thomas told readers he intended to uplift the pamphlet from its low standing as a compendium of “useless and unintelligible learning.”131 Thomas took aim, as did many critics, at the astrological content that did not hold the sway among the populace as it once did. Across the pond, the trend had occurred even earlier, with historian Bernard Capp estimating the English almanac’s peak in the seventeenth century with both the pamphlet, and astrology along with it, experiencing a “gradual” decline after the Stuart period.132 Despite Thomas’s efforts back in America, the almanac became marginalized, transformed into a country bumpkin. In an issue of the Weekly Magazine in 1798, a satirist submitted a new almanac plan “for the Use of People of Fashion” and suggested that “Instead of supposing with the vulgar tribe of astronomers, that the day begins at sun-rise; my day, commencing at the time that it usually breaks into fashionable apartments, will be determined by the rising of people of quality.”133 In 1825, Boston publishers Richardson and Lord used the word “old fashioned” to describe Thomas’s latest offering.134 Ironically, the almanac, a serialized genre meant to proceed with the times, had become dated. But just because the almanac’s heyday had passed did not mean it disappeared once it reached the nineteenth century or even that people replaced it immediately with other diary formats.135 A new breed of printers, some of whom recast themselves for an industrial age as blank book manufacturers, began to innovate and offer their customers a slicker, more streamlined substitute for the unfashionable almanac. In place of some of the extraneous essays and other trivial matter, publishers offered blank pages for record keeping, a feature rarely touted in earlier advertisements for the almanac.136 Direct descendants of the almanac, the fi rst printed diaries, such as Bioren’s Pocket Remembrancers, repackaged their almanac content with more diary space. For instance, the calendar pages in Bioren’s Pennsylvania Pocket Remembrancer . . . for 1820 were an abbreviated version of those in his Town and Country Almanack for the same year—the eclipse predictions, too, identical.137 Although the almanac in some circles remained vital and even experienced a revival later in the nineteenth century as a popular advertising vehicle for purveyors of patent medicine pitching Hostetter’s Bitters or

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53

Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, customers looking for a ready-made diary now had more to choose from. Publishers and diarists who came after Washington each had their reasons for leaving the almanac behind. In some respects the printers of the era had an easy task in selling the almanac. Both producers and consumers understood that an almanac was not an optional accessory but a critical necessity. Few could do without. If he did, he risked not knowing what day it was. Or what time the sun was expected to set on Sunday. Or the distance from Philadelphia to New York. Or how much debt he might accrue at 7 percent interest in five years. Not only did it provide the reader with a temporal footing, whether it be the day, the week, or the hour, it furnished an awareness of one’s local environs that no other product could supply. It was as concerned with space as with time and offered a variety of tools, such as interest tables and currency rates to calculate one’s fi nancial obligations. At the same time it kept readers aware of the outside world, the almanac also could direct them inside to the state of their own being. Almanacs were all about regulation, inside and out. Almanacs displayed a regulated universe governed by the laws of planetary motion, by the church calendar, by the zodiac. It seemed natural, then, that some readers might turn to an almanac to regulate themselves. What better way to do that than in a text that already possessed its own system. All one had to do was insert one’s own data into that printed form, like connecting the dots. This intersection between the almanac and the diary offers us a glimpse of a changing world, a moment when readers began to think of time as one’s own instead of thinking of time as belonging to God, or thinking of time as time versus thinking of time as money. The almanac paved the way to new products that would more comfortably accommodate the modern self, formats more reflective of new ways of conceiving of time, commerce, and the self.

Chapter Two

The Birth of a Daily Planner

E

ven as George Washington was busy scribbling daily notes in his Virginia Almanack, another lesser-known member of his revolutionary generation, a lawyer named James Wilson, decided to take a chance on a new product: a date book peddled by a Scottish-born bookbinder and publisher named Robert Aitken. In 1772, barely a year after setting up his bookshop at the foot of Market Street in Philadelphia, Aitken introduced his Complete Annual Account Book and Calendar for the Pocket or Desk for 1773.1 Wilson may have seen Aitken’s advertisement in the December 12 issue of the Philadelphia Chronicle promoting the book as “the fi rst attempt of the kind” in the American colonies. Or Wilson, visiting from nearby Carlisle, may have wandered into Aitken’s shop on a bustling market day. 2 Although it contained the same planetary charts and other astronomical elements available in an almanac, Aitken’s American Register, as it was known to locals, added a section of “Fifty-Two double pages ruled, for entering the receipts and payments of money; [and] spaces for daily memorandums.” Wilson used Aitken’s Account Book and Calendar just as Aitken predicted, pairing mentions of money with a succession of daily memos. In those defi ned spaces, Wilson kept track of his whereabouts, noting in past tense where he had been a certain day: “Was at Philadelphia,” or “Came to Easton.” But Aitken’s Register also allowed Wilson to look into the future. Wilson peppered Aitken’s calendar with reminders of upcoming court days, such as “Court at Northamn,” “Court at Newton,” “Court at Carlisle,” and “Court at Easton.”3 Wilson simply could not have done this in an almanac. Aitken’s preformatted diary section, with the days laid out in linear sequence, meant Wilson could anticipate events ahead of time. Unlike an almanac, Aitken’s design allowed Wilson to view time in a new way.

THE BIRTH OF A DAILY PLANNER

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Almanacs worked best retrospectively, as diarists jotted notes or events as they passed. Never intended as a diary, an almanac often became one inadvertently as users interspersed calendar pages with blank leaves. A diarist such as George Washington imposed order on the page himself, beginning a month’s worth of notes at the top of a page and proceeding downward using as much space as needed for each notation. Because the paper inserted between the almanac’s monthly calendar pages was blank, users could not record events or appointments set in the future. In an almanac, the only way to distinguish one day from the next was the arabic numeral a diarist jotted down each time he added an entry. Although a close cousin, the almanac could not provide the regimented order offered by Aitken’s Register that featured a chronological sequence of pages formatted and ruled by a commercial printer. What distinguished Aitken’s product from an almanac, and anything else in the American book market, was the Annual Account Book and Calendar. We’d call it a diary or date book. This kind of diary, a printed grid of dated spaces for recording monies and memos, had no precedent in the colonies, or so Aitken claimed. It dominated the volume and was arranged before the reference material at the back, signaling that one’s personal entries took precedence. It took Aitken nearly an entire page to explain its layout. Imagine Aitken’s book opened on a desk. The two-page spread of the calendar section covered a single week. On the left-hand side was a grid to mark down one’s expenses. Separated into three columns, the fi rst listed the transactions, the second the amount “Receiv’d,” the third the amount “Paid” in that transaction. The sums were supposed to be tallied at the bottom of the page and carried over to the next week’s account. The right-hand page allowed for memoranda often keyed to those dated expenses. There was space enough for one or two lines per day, depending on the size of one’s script. Aitken’s Register was much more than an almanac. For the fi rst time, customers could see the days of the week, month, year laid out before them in Aitken’s printed calendar. They could enter their daily expenses and personal engagements and turn Aitken’s book into their own. At least that was Aitken’s hope. James Wilson’s embrace of Aitken’s Register forecasts a thirst for record-keeping tools that would fuel a burgeoning market in blank books in another generation. The format enabled Wilson to set future events in time and, by assigning space to every calendar day, suggested that each day was unique and unlike any other. Aitken’s diary was a primer for

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Figure 2.1. Aitken boasted that the printed grid in his Account Book and Calendar was new to the American colonies. Author’s collection.

modernity in the way it foretold time in its memorandum section and asked users to account for themselves as they accounted for their money. Wilson’s use of the date book illustrates what set the daily planner apart from its predecessor. Nevertheless, despite Wilson’s enthusiasm, Aitken’s Register never caught on. This chapter examines how resistant Aitken’s customers were to what he was selling. Even on the cusp of a literal revolution, George Washington and other colonists clung to their interleaved almanacs and performed the daily rituals of record keeping as they had for decades. For them, there was no better way of situating themselves in the present with respect to both time and money. They were blind to the almanac’s limitations and resistant to any substitutes. They had, as of yet, no ambitions of recording the future and appeared reluctant to submit themselves to a calculated regimen a printer imposed. For most of Aitken’s loyal customers, his diary proved no more than a local “bauble,” a sym-

THE BIRTH OF A DAILY PLANNER

57

bol of their wealth and genteel taste. Very few used it as it was intended, demonstrating not only its versatility but also the failure of most customers to capitalize on what Aitken viewed as the benefits of his system. Now barely a footnote in the history of American publishing, Aitken’s bust reveals why these revolutionary Americans may not have been ready to subscribe to a prefabricated diary that would become commonplace in another generation. Although the aspiring publisher thought his product perfectly timed, Aitken failed to spark a revolution in the way Americans set their lives down on paper. Only a year after introducing his innovation to the American public, Aitken expressed doubts and removed the diary section from his 1774 Register, leaving just a compendium of colonial statistics. He claimed he was following the advice of his customers who asked him to “omit the memorandum-book” because it “swelled” the four- by six-inch volume “to a larger size than could be conveniently carried in the pocket.”4 Apparently his clientele did not appreciate the new format, so Aitken stuck to a more familiar approach and inserted blank leaves in his 1774 Register as he would in any almanac. A year after that, Aitken ceased publication of his Register altogether, presumably allowing him to focus on more lucrative pursuits. 5 He was sure his memorandum book would be a success, just as it was in Britain. And yet it didn’t sell. Aitken miscalculated on many fronts, including pricing and pushing for luxurious bindings of the humble product. There are also those factors over which Aitken had no control, such as a severe paper shortage and an impending rebellion that disrupted the distribution networks of all retail enterprises. Aitken’s Register cost ten times what an almanac might, or even more if a customer chose a fi ner binding. And that was partly the point. Aitken was a bookbinder, fi rst and foremost. That’s where he made his money. He did not even print the diary himself, leaving that to Joseph Crukshank. In fact, he may have bartered with Crukshank for printing his Register in exchange for binding services since, according to his shop accounts, Aitken appeared to do all the fi ne binding for printers in and around Philadelphia. For Messrs. Wilday & Montgomery, he supplied “1 Sett Spectator” in gilt for 2 pounds 4 shillings and charged another printer 4 pounds 1 shilling 8 pence for four volumes of “Stanton’s Journl” in “Letter’d & fi lleted Sheep.” Aitken also obliged private customers such as scientific lecturer Ebenezer Kinnersley who paid 7 shillings 6 pence for “binding in Calf [of] Franklin on Elec[tricit]y.”6

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Figure 2.2. According to the preface of Aitken’s 1774 Register, his customers requested he “omit the memorandum-book” because it “swelled” the volume and made it too large to carry in one’s pocket. Image courtesy of the Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

But despite the princely sums Aitken collected as a skilled bookbinder, he still cared what was inside a book’s cover, or so he professed in the inaugural edition of Aitken’s General American Register, and the Gentleman’s and Tradesman’s Complete Annual Account Book, and Calendar, for the Pocket or Desk; for the Year of Our Lord 1773, its

THE BIRTH OF A DAILY PLANNER

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full and proper title. In a preface to prospective customers, Aitken announced that “the time is now come, when [Aitken’s Memorandum Book] must be equally necessary and advantageous here” as it has long been “experienced and acknowledged in the Mother Country.” Aitken assured buyers that “Business will make such a manual as this absolutely necessary to some” and “To Strangers too it must be particularly beneficial.” 7 Aitken suggested that the time was ripe for Americans to embrace a diary that was all their own. Aitken owed his inspiration to another British innovator by the name of Robert Dodsley. In November 1748, Dodsley, a London bookseller, published the New Memoranda Book for 1749, which he later claimed (after booksellers dared to imitate it) was the fi rst and “Best Book” of its kind. Dodsley told his customers the volume was “neatly Printed in a Pocket Size on fi ne Writing Paper rul’d for Accounts, Appointments, and Memorandums, with Pockets for keeping Bills and Letters” and priced reasonably at 1s. 6d., “neatly bound.”8 Its contents, like its design, may sound familiar, especially the section of “Fifty-two Pages for the Receipts and Expences of every Week in the Year,” the phrase Aitken adopted decades later. Dodsley’s strategy was obvious. Under the copyright the Stationers’ Company held, only a handful of booksellers were permitted to publish the annual almanacs. Dodsley was not among the chosen few, meaning he missed out each year on a persistently lucrative corner of the English publishing market. Some printers flaunted the rules and sold pirated almanacs, whereas men like Dodsley pursued other avenues. Dodsley found a chink in the armor of the Stationers’ Company monopoly, for the copyright said nothing explicitly about the publication of pocket books, which shared some almanac features but offered an additional diary section for recording memoranda and accounts. Dodsley may not have been the fi rst to introduce this format to London but he certainly sparked a trend. The imitators soon followed, including Richard Baldwin’s Gentleman’s and Tradesman’s Daily Journal and Thomas Carnan’s Ladies Complete Pocket Book. The Stationers’ Company allowed these publications to compete with their almanacs for some time before taking action. It was not until 1772 that the courts stepped in to question whether these little books violated the company’s monopoly.9 By then it was too late. The pocket diary had established itself in Britain’s publishing marketplace. Aitken arrived in Philadelphia in May 1771 from Scotland, where he was already established as a binder and bookseller. A month after his ar-

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rival, Aitken set up shop in a commercial section near the wharf of the thriving colonial city and laid in a stock of reliable steady sellers such as Bibles, catechisms, psalm books, and spellers. Aitken borrowed a page, or two, from Dodsley’s invention. And because Aitken published in the American colonies, he did not have to worry about the Stationer’s Company monopoly. The almanac and its relatives had long been a mainstay of American printers, meaning Aitken did not have to circumvent the copyright rules.10 Aitken appeared to be very studied in his approach to his new business. There seemed to be nothing he did not think of, whether it was fi nding the right location, stocking the shelves, or choosing popular titles for publication. Aitken understood that in order to be successful he needed to be more than just an outlet for other publishers’ works. The real profit came in producing his own books and fi nishing them in fi ne bindings. Aitken’s Register was his fi rst foray into that field.11 He splashed his name at the top of the Register’s title page, acquainting potential customers with the new bookshop in town. Once established, Aitken went on to publish the fi rst two volumes of the Journals of Congress, the Pennsylvania Magazine, and the Aitken Bible of 1782, the fi rst American Bible.12 In 1784, historian Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, sought him out to publish his History of New Hampshire after he was told Aitken had “the most taste of a printer of any man in this city.” Soon Aitken’s storefront was described as “the largest and most valuable bookstore . . . in Philadelphia.”13 Aitken opened his doors in one of the busiest corners of the colonial world. A bustling eighteenth-century port with culture seeping from taverns and genteel salons, Philadelphia would soon be the center of revolutionary thought and host to the colonies’ top statesmen, the site of America on its way to becoming.14 What better place to begin the story of the modern American diary. Following the Seven Years’ War, Philadelphia’s population exploded, soon surpassing New York and Boston in size. Its economy kept pace with that growth, feeding the building trades and a thirst for manufactured consumer goods.15 Aitken’s shop was located alongside the docks at Front and Market streets and across the street from the bustling London Coffee House. The Coffee House, founded in 1754 by William Bradford with the fi nancial aid of private subscribers, drew crowds of people in search of drinks at its downstairs tavern or business deals conducted upstairs at its fledgling merchants’ exchange. Other businesses followed, including an employment office, a currency exchange, and William Goddard’s print shop.16 Print, as Aitken

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Figure 2.3. Aitken’s shop was well situated for walk-in business along the docks at Front and Market. Lithograph “Market Street, from Front St.” by J. C. Wild, ca. 1840, the Library Company of Philadelphia.

calculated, played a large role in the city’s boom. On the eve of Aitken’s arrival in Philadelphia, the city had taken over as the center of print production in the American colonies and boasted as many as thirty bookshops, a quarter of the number in London’s metropolis. Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most famous of Philadelphia’s printers, but at least a dozen more joined the fray between 1746 and 1767. They doubled the amount of print produced in that period, and book imports into the city quadrupled. As Philadelphia printers became more proficient at pumping out basic print matter such as almanacs, buyers began to demand more “variety and luxury at the high end of the market.”17 Aitken landed in Philadelphia at the peak of a consumer revolution

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during which “buyers voiced concerns about color and texture, about fashion and etiquette, and about making the right choices from among an expanding number of possibilities.”18 British goods flooded into the American colonies where the per capita rate of consumption of these manufactured goods was rising faster than the population itself. Historian T. H. Breen has estimated that British imports grew 120 percent between 1750 and 1773, the year Aitken published his fi rst Register.19 What this “empire of goods” delivered to Americans was choice. No longer did they have to satisfy themselves with one china pattern or a few shades of silks and linens. With a flood of luxury goods sailing into Philadelphia, only their pocketbooks limited what colonists acquired from abroad. Although far from typical, the accumulation of the following textiles in the household of Jonathan Dickinson underscores the extent of colonial wants: “two dozen upholstered cushions for their chairs, eleven sets of ‘inside and outside Curtains, Vailings, head & Tester clothes’ for their beds, almost one hundred towels, and more than one hundred napkins.” While women tended to focus on the purchasing of fabrics, gentlemen turned their attention to procuring furnishings, silver plate, carriages, and books. In a 1771 advertisement, bookseller Hugh Gaine boasted having on hand “a great Variety of Gentlemen and Ladies Pocket Books, with and without Instruments, many of them very handsome” that were “Just imported in Last Vessels from London.” 20 Like many of the imported goods, Aitken’s Register was aimed at those buyers who could afford such everyday luxuries. Nevertheless, once relations between Britain and her colonies grew strained, many elites curbed their imports and focused instead on buying goods closer to home. In that sense, Aitken’s General American Register was well timed. The boycotts of British manufactures sparked by the implementation of duties on imported goods such as glass, paper, and paint in the 1767 Townshend Acts was still fresh in the minds of many colonists. 21 Aitken was surely aware of the nonimportation movements since he visited Philadelphia in 1769 when protests were still in full swing. Aitken came with a stock of imported goods to sell and may have been scouting out the city in hopes of moving his business and family to this opportunistic edge of civilization. He advertised his stock in the Pennsylvania Gazette and warned customers not to delay, “as the proprietor will make but a short stay in this place.”22 His Register fit well into the paradoxical mood of colonial consumers. For, on the one hand,

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American consumers coveted British-made goods and believed them to represent the highest fashion. On the other, they became increasingly aware that their thirst for imports made them too dependent on British merchants and their easy credit. 23 Aitken confronted this dilemma masterfully. He offered his customers a book that owed its design to the “Mother Country” but was not of the Mother Country. Made in Aitken’s shop in Philadelphia, the Register offered consumers everything Dodsley’s New Memoranda Book did, yet it allowed them, if only symbolically, to proclaim their independence. With a table of the kings and queens of England at the top of the Register’s contents page, it reminded users that they remained loyal British subjects. But the words on the title page began to take precedence. Aitken’s was an American Register, and its owners were, fi rst and foremost, Americans. It’s perhaps no accident, then, that some diarists, staking out unused pages in later years, turned Aitken’s Register into a virtual commemorative of revolutionary events. It may have been a delegate to the Continental Congress, some of whom were regular customers of Aitken’s, who used his Register to set down a complete list of the gentlemen in attendance at the First Continental Congress. The diarist, who left his Register unsigned, titled the list: “Delegates who attended the Congress at Philada.” Interestingly, his list was nearly perfect. Only three names are missing: John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Richard Caswell of North Carolina, and George Washington of Virginia. 24 Perhaps one of the missing delegates in that list actually owned the diary. Another customer used it to recount events in which he himself had participated, for he wrote on the Register’s back page: “Wife & ch-l-d-n left Philada. Monday 15th 7ber 1777 Left do self . . . Sunday 21st 1777.”25 Writing many years after the events, another diarist—perhaps the child of the Register’s original owner—recalled in bold ink that on “Apr. 19th 1775 Hostilities fi rst commenc’d by the King’s Troops at LEXINGTON.” The next entry reads: “The tyrannie King of G. Britain is oblig’d to declare the united States of N. America Free, & Independent on the 5th of Dec 1782.” 26 These diarists may have been drawn to the Register’s hint at American-ness, which made it the perfect place for such memorials. Aitken must have felt the moment just right. Witnessing the colonial craving for all things British, he aimed to give his clients a substitute that felt neither homegrown nor homespun but replicated the cosmopolitan sumptuousness of a London import. Customers could purchase the

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four- by six-inch memo book, just as they might in any London shop, with leather flaps that wrapped securely around it and provided pockets to store critical receipts, money, and other slips of paper. It would cost more, of course, adding as much as a shilling or more to the price. Once fi lled, the pockets’ contents further personalized the book, holding calling cards, shopping lists, or for women, needles and fabric swatches. As for choice of bindings, clients decided, with Aitken’s help, how plush the appearance. “Mr. Stewart” paid an additional 2 shillings for Aitken’s memo book in “Calf & neat Done.” Among the most lavish was the fi nishing Aitken performed for a “Mr James” whose Register was delivered in “Green Turkey” leather at twice the price. Merchant David Beveridge also paid a heavy premium when he requested his Register be “neat bound with a pencil.” 27 Each time these customers pulled Aitken’s portable account book from their pockets, such fi nishings displayed their fi ne taste and marked them as members of a genteel and elite set among an increasingly diverse urban populace. The sumptuous bindings of Aitken’s product easily distinguished it from an almanac that typically sold with nothing more than a paper wrapper. But Aitken also hoped his customers might appreciate what was between its covers. Inside Aitken’s date book, there was no guesswork. If Reverend Richard Peters, a prominent Philadelphia minister and owner of a copy of Aitken’s 1773 Register, wanted to record the date his “Two Coach horses went to Mr. Turner’s Place,” he turned to a page in the memo book reserved for the third week of February and made an entry inside the small, ruled rectangle beside Wednesday, February 17, leaving the other dated spaces on the page entirely blank. Next, Peters might turn the page and see that the following Wednesday was “Ash Wednesday” since Aitken added religious rites and other notable observances to the printed calendar. If Peters looked as far ahead as March 18, Aitken’s diary reminded him that it was that date upon which the “STAMP ACT [was] repealed.” 28 In addition, even though the almanac may have been considered portable, it was a little too large for a pocket. And with only a fl imsy paper cover, it was less durable than a hardbound book. Aitken answered both issues by providing a sturdy, pocket-sized stand-in. Still, it was the Register’s neat arrangement of dates and orientation toward the future that set it apart most from its biggest rival in the bookshop. Aitken had not abandoned the astronomical elements of the almanac, but they were much less prominent in his design. At the top of each

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memoranda page was the planetary chart for that week, indicating the dates of the moon’s phases and locations of the planets. Below that were several vertical columns, the widest allowing for notes and observations added over time by the user. The others offered up more astronomical data such as the rising and setting of the stars, moon, and sun, as well as the saints’ days and other events the Church of England observed. 29 The cyclical world the rhythm of the heavens represented was relegated to a footnote of sorts, overtaken by a new, more linear sense of the future. Time was governed by the march of one’s daily entries, rather than where a day fell in relation to the natural order. Where the almanac emphasized a cyclical or seasonal conception of time, Aitken’s diary offered a chronology the user literally made up in the writing. 30 The only other alternative to Aitken’s invention was a humble daybook “farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains, and perhaps a few housewives” enlisted for the daily recording of receipts and expenditures. Oftentimes, those fi nancial accounts merged with other more personal entries on family events or local happenings. 31 Daybooks often were contained in larger, hardbound blank books or on folded sheets of paper and were likely too bulky to be carried around and were relegated instead to a bookshelf or desk. The benefits of Aitken’s design versus the daybook were similar to its advantages over the almanac: order and portability. Owners of Aitken’s format did not have to devise an index or number pages to fi nd a critical entry regarding a settled debt or large expenditure. He only had to peruse the dated columns on each lefthand page that tracked a single week’s accounts with separate columns for monies “Receiv’d” and “Paid.” If an expenditure required some explanation, he turned to the spaces on the opposite page reserved for just such memorandum. When Dodsley introduced this style of memoranda book to his London audience, he used the word “methodical” to describe its main virtue. “Disposed in a Method more useful and convenient for all Sorts of Business” was how he put it. 32 By imposing order or “method” on their record keeping, Aitken promised buyers greater success in their business endeavors: a life of linear progress, noted day by day. What better way to transact business than to carry your accounts along with as you proceeded through the day. Its portability meant it could travel wherever you went and had the potential to become, literally and figuratively, an accessory of the self. Whether or not it made that psychological transition depended on the owner. Cus-

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Figure 2.4. Aitken’s title page suggested his innovation was for accounting fi rst and daily memoranda second, but ultimately his customers would decide what features took precedence. Author’s collection.

tomers also decided on how much weight to place on the diary’s dual purpose as account book or diary. Aitken seemed to suggest in its title and his preface that his creation was for accounting fi rst and daily memoranda second. Ultimately, however, Aitken’s customers, such as Reverend Peters, would decide the features that were most valuable. Added to the Complete Annual Account Book, and Calendar and located at the back of the volume was Aitken’s General American Register, a sixty-four-page manual of royal and provincial statistics. With a separate title page, the manual or General American Register listed all of the public officials in the colonies, the kings and queens of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the names of “His majesty’s consuls abroad for the protection of trade,” and other data. 33 With trade expanding among the colonies, Aitken believed his manual could help the merchant negotiate

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an increasingly complicated and far-flung marketplace. In truth, however, some almanacs, such as Mein and Fleeming’s Massachusetts Register, had for years offered up similar tables and lists, though not as comprehensively as Aitken’s compendium. 34 What set Aitken’s apart from these forebears was its attempt to be universal in encompassing all of the provinces of North America from “New-Foundland” to “West Florida.” Almanacs were a much more local product, geared toward negotiating one’s way around local roads and inns. Aitken preferred to serve up statistics on a proto-national scale. It did not matter where one lived, the Register would serve the needs of everyone. The “intercourse and connection of the several colonies with each other,” Aitken explained, meant that “it becomes a matter of some consequence to every inhabitant, to be acquainted with the public offices and officers, not only of the particular province in which he resides, but in all the other provinces on the continent.”35 So in his effort to make his Register useful, Aitken designed a book that might also attract those men promoting unity among the separate colonies, men who envisioned not only a commercial but a national self. One might think Aitken, and his diary, were all business. At least that’s the way it appeared from its design and from the claims Aitken made in his preface about business making “such a manual as this absolutely necessary.” Even in his newspaper advertising, Aitken appealed to those men involved in the “political and commercial interests of British America,” presumably the Gentleman and Tradesman referred to in the Register’s full title. And yet there are indications Aitken had hopes for a wider audience. As stated above, Aitken suggested that every inhabitant should “be acquainted with the public offices and officers . . . in all the other provinces on the continent.” Certainly, it is clear that Aitken was primarily targeting men who were mobile and flush enough to travel throughout the provinces, or at the very least doing business remotely with these distant locales. Still, Aitken added that “curiosity” might compel others to purchase his manual and “to strangers too it must be particularly beneficial.” It is in these phrases that Aitken opened the door to other customers besides the man on the move, perhaps allowing that a few genteel ladies might fi nd the contents of interest. The only way to know for certain who responded to Aitken’s pitch is by examining his sales receipts. *

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Aitken’s shop records reveal that he served a genteel clientele, many of them among the “who’s who” of Philadelphia society: wealthy merchants, successful surgeons, renowned ministers and politicians; and at least a half-dozen future signers of the Declaration of Independence. 36 To encourage sales of his inaugural Register, Aitken may have tried to capitalize on his proximity to the bustling London Coffee House. In fact, below the advertisement for Aitken’s 1773 Register in the Pennsylvania Chronicle was an announcement of an upcoming auction of a China manufactory and its wares at the Coffee House “between the hours of five and eight” on Monday, December 21. 37 Aitken surely hoped some in attendance at the auction might wander over to his store to check out his new Register. Failing that strategy, Aitken could always rely on market days— Wednesdays and Saturdays—to bring in potential customers. In September 1774, Silas Deane, who was in town for the meeting of the First Continental Congress, could not have stood far from Aitken’s shop when he witnessed this particular market day: “The whole of their Market is in one Street, and is Near Twelve Hundred Feet in Length, the Street is as Wide As the Broad Street or Way in New York, & is as full as you can conceive of People for about Four Hours. They expose Horses, Cattle, & Sheep, Earthen Ware, Stockings, &c, &c, in the Market with other Things so that they really have an Assortment.”38 On an earlier market day in December 1772, buyers did wander into Aitken’s bookshop. And some departed with Aitken’s new Register bulging from their pockets. Aitken recorded brisk sales that day—Wednesday, December 17—the fi rst market day after his advertisement appeared in the Chronicle. While some of Aitken’s memoranda books did go to working men such as tailors, shoemakers, and tallow chandlers, the majority were purchased by professionals, military officers, and gentry—men such as Joseph Galloway, speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, or “His Honor John Penn,” son of Virginia planters and North Carolina delegate to the Second Continental Congress. After all, these were the men who could afford the neatly bound book, and maybe the kind of customers most attracted to a memoranda book that announced itself as American. He sold three Registers to Francis Hopkinson, a prominent lawyer who would a year later serve as a delegate to the Continental Congress; another to Benjamin Duffield, a surgeon; and one each to James Humphreys and Archibald Stewart, two young printers (Stewart apprenticed to William Bradford), both of whom were likely checking out the competition. 39 One Register went to a Mr. Foulke, a professor of French; and a half-dozen each to

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Charles Crukshank, of Maryland, and George Meade, a prominent Philadelphia merchant and land speculator. A “Mr. James,” who boarded at widow “Mrs Houses,” where Silas Deane would stay when dispatched to the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774, paid 8 shillings for the “Green Turkey” Register, a sum equivalent to three days’ wages for a Philadelphia laborer. Aitken also recorded a sale of his Register to at least one lady, “Mrs Ferguson at Graeme Park” or Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, one of the literary lights of her day and hostess to an intellectual circle that included Anglican minister Jacob Duché and Benjamin Rush. In addition to Aitken’s Register, Fergusson purchased another Aitken imprint for 1772: William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine; or, The Family Physician, fi nished in “gilt” for 10 shillings.40 All told, Aitken sold twenty-two Registers that fi rst day for 4s. 6p apiece, ten times the price of the average almanac.41 As Aitken had hoped, some clients paid extra to have the Register bound in calf or “Green Turkey” leather, or fi nished with flaps or pockets to hold business cards or receipts. Sales of the memoranda book continued into late January of 1773, with dozens sold wholesale to booksellers and storekeepers outside Philadelphia. Samuel Loudon ordered two dozen for his print shop in New York City. Charles Crouch took two dozen back with him to his store in South Carolina. Isaac Collins carried some to Burlington, New Jersey. John Hall and James Adams introduced the Register to Wilmington, and Caleb Johnson brought it to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And at least one peddler, John Shedden of New Castle, took a dozen of the bound memoranda books on the road with him, along with a stash of “sorted histories,” “catechisms,” prayer books, and surely some almanacs.42 He sold more than three hundred that fi rst year, a decent-sized edition for its day. But that would not be enough. No matter the sales figures, Aitken’s customers would determine his success or failure at introducing a new diary to the American public. Aitken counted on an urban and urbane populace to admire his attempt to provide an alternative to the ordinary almanac. Social, cultural, and economic changes in the British American colonies may have signaled to Aitken a potential market for his brand of blank book. Customers were more literate, more facile with numbers and accounts, and more aware of a clock-oriented universe that demanded they pay closer attention to matters of time and money. Aitken offered them an orderly, printed layout that provided enough space for a serial addition of words and numbers they collected each day. Yet those customers had to be

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fairly conversant in those words and numbers, and have a need to set their lives in time, to have use for such a gadget. Aitken may have misread the Philadelphia public upon which his plan rested. As culturally diverse and thriving a city as it was by the late eighteenth century, Philadelphia remained a provincial backwater in many ways with a population more conservative in values and less experimental in their recordkeeping pursuits than their London cousins.43 As chapter one made clear, the almanac remained the true arbiter of time in revolutionary America. In fact, Michael O’Malley begins his history of American time by taking a close look at almanacs in their role “as guides for understanding, interpreting, and managing time correctly as it rolled along toward God’s eternity.” Still, historians tend to make an exception for city dwellers whose lives required closer attention to the clock, since people needed to time visits to market days, court meetings, evening performances, and other social rituals.44 But the presence of such public, and private, timepieces did not necessarily signal a sudden shift to a new way of being in time. Even in late eighteenth-century Berlin, a city rife with turret clocks, scholar Michael Sauter argues that the arrival of modern time discipline did not occur until the institution of an official regional standard after 1810 when the local magistrates deemed that all the city’s clocks be set to mean time.45 Telling time in the colonial city depended much on where one stood. If one was walking near the State House, a resident might hear the tower bell clang the turn of the hour thanks to the pair of clocks installed on the east and west faces of the building by clockmaker Thomas Stretch in 1753.46 Or, if one were wealthy enough to own one, one might consult the hands moving around an ornate, brass dial of a tall casement clock manufactured by Stretch or another local artisan since the early 1700s. Among the most famous of those clocks was one built in 1773 by the city’s own David Rittenhouse that displayed time in hours, minutes, and seconds and boasted an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, and four miniature corner dials that tracked the rise and setting of the sun and moon, perennial reminders of time’s source in nature.47 But even if a clock was close at hand, that did not mean early Philadelphians possessed the same sense of time as we do today. Our modern time consciousness did not emerge until the nineteenth century, though historians, such as Mark Smith who has examined the clock-ruled rituals on antebellum Southern plantations, have complicated the causal link with industrialization fi rst proposed by E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work-

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Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” As Martin Bruegel notes in his study of the rise of time consciousness in the lower Hudson Valley, clocks and watches in the countryside began as objects of refi nement, much like Aitken’s Register, before asserting more control over their owners’ sense of time. “People owned timepieces before time owned people,” Bruegel writes, noting that it took time for the diffusion of such devices to instill values of punctuality and timeliness that we routinely associate today with the mechanism of the clock.48 Accordingly, most of the direct references owners left in the pages of Aitken’s Register represent the same marks of occasion colonists recorded in their almanacs. Such time signals memorialized both the highs and lows of a diarist’s life, insuring the remembrance of deaths, marriages, births, and other milestones from year to year. An unidentified diarist recorded receiving “a New Watch from Mr Law:ce Birnie of Philadelphia No. 42 June 24th 1777” in his Aitken’s Register. The gift of a new watch must have enabled him to note with such precision that “Mr. Jas. Ferguson Died 7ber [September] 22d 1779 10 minutes before 12, at night . . . Aged 24 years.”49 When his father died on July 24, 1795, clockmaker Nichols Goddard pulled out his watch and his diary and wrote: “A Day of Trouble, my Father Died at half past 12 o’clock.”50 Goddard couldn’t mark the time of his father’s death without his clock, and he couldn’t memorialize it without his diary. But such markers do not demonstrate a more regulated, sequential commitment to time’s passage that literary scholar Stuart Sherman views as the hallmark of a modern temporality shared by the diary and the clock. “In both timekeepers and texts, the new temporality dealt in small durations closely tracked,” Sherman argues. “The new kind of clock could, for the fi rst time, count minutes reliably. The new pattern of prose numbered the days. It represented itself as accumulating by consecutively dated daily installments. In England this diurnal design appears fi rst in the manuscript diary and then, four decades later, in the daily newspaper.” While Sherman sees that connection entrenched in English society by the late eighteenth century, a similar bond between clock and diary did not take hold in America until after the turn of the nineteenth. 51 Even though Philadelphia’s population on the eve of revolution had grown to about 30,000 due to the immigration of laborers, artisans, and other workers who fueled its chief pursuits of maritime commerce, shipbuilding, and construction, only a fraction of them might be able to afford Aitken’s Register. Many of those workers, and even the city’s mer-

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chants, suffered greatly in the decades following the Seven Years’ War due to a credit crisis in England, a decline in shipbuilding, and the nonimportation agreements of 1769–70. 52 Such economic cycles widened the distance between the top and bottom rungs of society and thus limited the audience Aitken could count on for his deluxe diary. But it wasn’t just a matter of money that put Aitken’s pocket book out of reach for these customers. (Coincidentally, a pocketbook also referred in this era to a wallet, with the two meanings often interchangeable.)53 What also set these consumers apart were the skills of numeracy and literacy. Arithmetic was considered a specialized subject in early America and therefore was not taught in grammar, district schools, or academies. If one wanted to move beyond the addition and subtraction of small numbers, one had to hire a private instructor, learn on the job, or teach oneself, as Benjamin Franklin claims to have done by studying a textbook. With so few city dwellers adept at numbers, Aitken missed out when he promoted his memo book as a financial tool. A more even distribution of arithmetic skills would arrive in the new Republic when architect Benjamin Latrobe “called for new books that would offer proofs and explanations and do away with the ‘heavy memory work’” and, by the 1820s, public schools embraced a new approach to arithmetic training that would inculcate an appreciation for numbers by introducing the subject to children as young as six or seven years of age. 54 Unlike numeracy, the acquisition of literacy in colonial America was a two-stage process, with reading taught fi rst followed by instruction in penmanship. Although one skill followed the other it wasn’t assumed that everyone, especially girls, needed both. In a port city like Philadelphia, handwriting had strong commercial ties with writing masters advertising instruction in penmanship as a “mercantile subject.” Thomas Watts, who ran a private business academy in eighteenth-century London, explained the connection between penmanship and countinghouse: “Whoever would be a Man of Business, must be a Man of Correspondence, and Correspondence can never be so commodiously, or at all to the Purpose maintain’d, as by the Use of the Pen: So that WRITING is the First Step, and Essential in furnishing out the Man of Business.” At the same time, handwriting could also be considered a craft, the “mark of gentle breeding” or a female accomplishment akin to needlework, dancing, or music. Nevertheless, what Aitken expected of his customers was not simply the skills of reading and writing but a new attitude, a sophisticated kind

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of literacy that allowed one to blur the lines between script and print as never before. Historian Tamara Thornton argues that by the time of the American Revolution the “emergence of print worked to defi ne a set of meanings and functions for handwriting,” and print became everything handwriting was not, the two were polar opposites. If print was public, handwriting was private. “If print was the realm of social promiscuity and ideological control, script was the realm of exclusivity, privacy and freedom,” Thornton wrote. 55 By asking customers to add their own script to his printed design, Aitken blended the two realms. Even with a publishing scene unparalleled in colonial America as the center of book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishing, it was a lot to expect of the Philadelphia’s readers. 56 As sophisticated as many of Aitken’s customers were, they could not envision a role for print that asked more of themselves. To insert oneself in a book seemed beyond the pale. James Wilson was Aitken’s ideal customer. He and a handful of others used Aitken’s register as it was intended: a personally inscribed handbook of time and money. Also a Scot, Wilson was educated, ambitious, and well connected. At age twenty-three, he arrived in Philadelphia in 1765 after abandoning divinity school and a brief stint at merchant accounting. He tutored at the College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, and began studying law with John Dickinson. By 1772, Wilson had moved to Carlisle, outside Harrisburg and one hundred miles west of the urban center of Philadelphia, married a local heiress by the name of Rachel Bird, and was managing a thriving law practice. In short, Wilson possessed just the sort of genteel credentials of many of Aitken’s clientele. Wilson would soon join in the revolutionary movement against Great Britain and be among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In a pamphlet he wrote in 1768 and later published in 1774, Wilson proclaimed that Parliament had no authority over the colonies, and that the power of the British monarch was trumped by that of the colonial assemblies. 57 The purchase of an expensive, leatherbound General American Register allowed Wilson to demonstrate his gentility and his American identity all at once. Each time Wilson pulled out his diary it was as if he were checking his watch. Whether Aitken knew it or not, his Register also served as a timepiece. Wilson used it to locate himself in time. When Wilson recorded in his fi rst entry “Counsel fees till this time,” his time focus was not on eternity or on agricultural cycles, but the issues of every day, the “here-andnow.”58 On the diary’s pages, Wilson, more than his contemporaries, ap-

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peared to inhabit the time clocks tolled, albeit at a much more leisurely pace. 59 Aitken’s product coincided with the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the American colonies. Clocks had been imported into the colonies since the beginning, though in increasing numbers after the eighteenth century. By midcentury, native craftsmen began to set up their own shops, and soon Philadelphia and its vicinity had more than twenty clockmakers plying the trade.60 Despite these numbers, clock production in America was still very low, a function of competition from imports and the fact that most colonists could not afford such a luxury. Pocket watches were still rare in America in this period, and wrist watches more than a century off.61 More portable than a casement clock, Aitken’s Register carried in its pages its own time discipline, connected to days rather than hours. The diary’s contents also underscored the increasing pervasiveness of clock time. Next to the memoranda or diary spaces in Aitken’s Register were columns noting—in clock time—the rising and setting of the moon and sun, time’s original arbiters. The clock and the printed diary were, after all, both instruments of chronology. Both devices marked events in time. The clock divided the day into tiny, regular, increments and divorced time from its celestial inspiration. The diary divided time in a similar fashion, parsing up the days of the year into equal and identical spaces. The clock and the diary were earthly innovations bound to the day-today rhythms of an ordinary, individual life.62 With Aitken’s Register, diarists could easily locate in time life’s events, large and small. Wilson took to Aitken’s mode of record keeping more readily than most for a few reasons. First, he was born in Scotland, where he was exposed to this kind of memoranda book long before it made its way to the colonies. Indeed, there are many surviving pocket diaries from this period in England whose owners match Wilson’s adeptness for the form.63 Also, his earlier training in merchant accounting surely gave him an appreciation for order and method that could be exercised in his use of Aitken’s Register.64 While Wilson did not practice double entry bookkeeping in its pages, he demonstrated a willingness and ability to manage an array of commercial transactions, a reflection of the growing market in which he lived. On the accounts pages, Wilson kept track of his counsel fees in addition to the sums he routinely lost at whist. (He won only once. His take: 2 shillings.) He also was careful to note virtually every expense, from the most petty (8 pence for a ferry ride or a pair of

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“garters”) to the more extravagant (8 pounds for a cache of “11 Lottery Tickets”). Wilson used the printed diary to order an increasingly rich and objectfi lled physical life. He recorded there whether or not he’d paid for “a Table” or “1 pair of Snuffers,” what he’d given to his “Barber” or to “the Shaw woman” for washing his clothes. But money was not the only thing to change hands, for on February 11, 1773, Wilson wrote that he “Swoped wth Saml Henry 1 pair of breeches & 3 Dollars for a bever hatt.”65 With his Register in hand, Wilson participated in what T. H. Breen has called a market of “unprecedented size and fluidity,” one that provided “myriad opportunities for individual choice.” He appeared to embrace this commercial bounty but not without enlisting a device to negotiate the new terrain. More typical than Wilson were the customers who viewed Aitken’s Register primarily as an account book: men like George Nelson. As a clerk and later a salt and sugar merchant, Nelson had a head for numbers and must have relished the opportunity to carry his accounts with him in Aitken’s portable book.66 Nelson could have purchased Aitken’s Register . . . for 1773 at any number of locales in Philadelphia. Printers Crukshank, Bradford, and a host of merchants had at least a dozen on hand in December 1772 to sell to regular customers.67 Nelson took to Aitken’s account pages quite readily, using the ruled columns to keep track of his personal spending for such items as “Cloth Buttons & Mohair for coat” and “Expenses for the House,” and to tally lottery tickets he had sold for St. Paul’s Church. But he left the memoranda pages blank, except for two entries. The week of January 10, Nelson ignored the ruled lines that separated one day from the next and recorded a “List of some of the Jury that tried Purviance and Brett for the Murder of the Watch Man.” And in another entry, almost exactly six months later, Nelson recorded on Friday, June 11, in a space reserved for only a line or two of small script: “in the morning about 9 oclock had a lump of Ice in my hand that had been brought 9 miles.”68 The latter entry is especially suggestive of how others will come to use this diary format: to mark in time—however briefly—the events of one’s own, individual life. However, Nelson’s overall reluctance to use the diary pages as Aitken intended to track future engagements or narrate daily events demonstrates how resistant Nelson and others may have been to this pocket novelty. Perhaps Nelson did not like to be told, as instructed by the printed format, how

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brief to keep his entries or how often to make them. Nelson preferred a looser, more extemporaneous mode of diary keeping, as we learn from another of Nelson’s diaries that has survived.69 In this alternate diary contained in blank, folio-sized pages, Nelson had sole control and plenty of space. Covering the years 1780 to 1781 and 1790 to 1792, the diary probably began as eight- by twelve-inch sheets, later bound either by Nelson or an archivist intent on preservation. Free of the imposition of any publisher, Nelson could make up the form on his own. He could write daily, or not. His entries might consist of three lines, or twenty. His writing was not constrained by print or format or ruled lines. On July 3, 1780, he noted the weather that day (“Fine . . . but very warm”) and wondered whether “Mr Hiltzheimer,” his business partner, would “Prosecute Evans for the Abuse he gave him last Saturday.” The next day Nelson left the weather for the end of his entry (“rain’d hard all the Morning but cleard up about Noon”) and began instead with a note commemorating “The Anniversary of Independence,” and went on to describe, in some detail, the commencement proceedings held that day at the “College,” probably the College of Philadelphia. He noted those in attendance (“the Congress, President, & Council, French Ambassador, with a vast number of Gentlemen and Ladies”), the quality of the speeches (“the young Gentlemen spoke with ease and propriety”), and the celebrations afterward (“Bells began to ring early and about twelve Guns was fi red & Flag hoisted . . . Congress with a number of officers and Gentlemen Dine in the State House from there adjourned to the City Tavern”).70 Aitken’s tiny Register would never have accommodated Nelson’s discursive remarks. Rather than change his style to conform to Aitken’s printed grid, Nelson ignored the memoranda pages entirely. Nelson used Aitken’s Register, in this given moment, as he knew how. For him, Aitken’s diary was primarily an account of money, nothing more. Reverend Richard Peters took a similar attitude toward Aitken’s design. He embraced the fi nancial pages of the date book, keeping a running tally of his monthly expenses and earnings. No humble country clergyman, Peters was in his day among the wealthiest men in the city. Before taking up the position of rector of Christ Church in 1762 at the age of fi fty-eight, Peters served the colonial government of Pennsylvania as a land agent collecting rents, overseeing Indian policy, and laying out the region’s counties, towns, and roads. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, the value of Peters’s vast frontier landholdings accrued, allowing

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him to return to the church.71 Such a gentleman could use a convenient and portable device to track his daily transactions. A lot of money flowed in and out of his accounts pages. No sum appeared too small or too great to be set down. On January 15, he noted the 15 shillings he gave “Martha Harris” and added “Charity” in parentheses to further explain the expense. Peters listed the price he paid for staples for house and barn such as cordwood and hay. He spruced up his attire with acquisitions such as a “New Whig” at 3 pounds, “Linnen for Shirts” at “L5.6.3” and a pair of “briches” for “L1.6.3.” He recorded wages paid to his staff, including 1 pound for “Peggy the House Maid” and 6 pounds for his “Coachman.” On the plus side, Peters collected income from the church and vast sums of rent from his lands. January was typical in that regard. Peters received 15 pounds for performing a marriage on the twenty-ninth and another 74 pounds “for Support” from the church. Still, the bulk of his income came from his property for which he received 637 pounds and 15 shillings in January alone. Much of that went to paying off debts and various expenses, leaving him with a balance of just over 55 pounds, which he carried over to the next month.72 Only twice do we glimpse more of Peters than the able administrator of his own fi nances. Like Nelson, Peters’s use of the memo pages for personal observations was a rarity. If he did enlist the diary opposite his accounts it was to serve as footnote to a transaction or to mark when his horses had been boarded at “Mr. Turners place.” However, in March of that year, Peters received a disturbing confession and recounted the episode in his small, cramped hand across three days in his diary, ignoring the printer’s ruled lines that separated one day from the next. Peters wrote: “14th a woman whom I visited at the Hospital without my saying one word to her told me she had some years ago murdered her child. I know not wh[ether] she be in a sane or unsane mind. I consulted Mr. Chew & shall follow his advice.” Mr. Chew was likely Benjamin Chew, a reputable attorney and Pennsylvania’s future chief justice. We’ll never know the content of Chew’s advice, for Peters does not mention the incident again. Later that year, Peters must have experienced some nagging health problems, not surprising for a man of his age. We can only guess the cause of his ailment from a note he entered on August 14: “This day for the fi rst time I made water without pain.” Perhaps a kidney stone or faulty prostate? It’s anyone’s guess since Peters, once again, failed to fi ll in the record. Considering the overwhelmingly fi nancial nature of Peters’s record keeping, it is remarkable that these particular entries made

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it in at all. But he may have had nowhere else to vent on these matters since it is unclear whether he kept a separate journal as Nelson did.73 Apart from these rare glimpses of Peters’s personal affairs and the financial workings of his household, his date book also reveals an ongoing struggle with the order Aitken’s format imposed. On the account pages, Peters disregarded the printed headings such as “6th Week’s Account” at the top that instructed the customer to enlist that page for the transactions of a single week. Instead, Peters had his own system of dating his expenses and receipts chronologically and carrying over from one page to the next without adhering to the weekly grid. His accounts, then, appeared as they might in the pages inserted inside the monthly calendar of an almanac, except that he had the benefit of lined columns for noting the value of his transactions. In addition, Peters seemed either unwilling or unable to heed the dates printed so neatly alongside the rectangles parsed out week by week in the memo book. Across from an accounts page that noted payments of 1 pound apiece to publishers Dunlap and Bradford for “his Newspapers,” Peters added a memo opposite in a space reserved for Sunday, December 12, that read “Gave Dunlap and Bradford notice not to send me any Newspapers.” More than likely Peters sent such a notice the day before on Saturday, the eleventh, since that is the date he used to record the expenditure to the newsmen. Either he did not realize he had entered the notation on the wrong date or he did not care. In fact, Peters had to pen in the date himself to mark the visit to the murderous mother in the hospital since he misentered it under March 16 instead of the fourteenth. He had already used the blanks set aside for the fourteenth and fi fteenth of that month for a fi nancial item that had no relation to time. On occasion, Peters’s lack of adherence to dates in the calendar seemed to result from carelessness or confusion more than willful resistance. For instance, Peters mistook the fi rst of October for the date he returned from a week-long trip to New York, even though he recorded the actual date in the entry: “Returnd from New York Saturday the 9 of ober.” It’s difficult to understand his confusion until one looks more closely at the way the printer laid out the calendar page, denoting the space set aside for that Friday with the numerals 1 marking the day of the month and 6 for the day of the week. Perhaps Peters saw the 6 and confused it for the following Friday, the day before his return. In any case, Peters eventually caught the error, crossing out the entry with hash marks of his pen and reentering the phrase “Returnd from New York” on the proper day at the bottom of the next page. Such

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bewilderment led to a few more slashed entries. Obviously, Peters did not refer to the memo book regularly enough to appreciate the sequence it provided. For Peters, this was no daily regimen; Aitken’s method was lost on him. *

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Aitken offered Wilson and other customers a tool for ordering their monies, their businesses, and their lives. Instead of embracing Aitken’s call for “method” and “utility,” however, many ignored or manipulated the text in haphazard and disorderly ways. Such uses suggest resistance as well as the versatility of the restrictive format. Some customers ripped out memoranda pages, making it easier to carry notes with them or desperate for a spare sheet in the paper-starved city. Others ignored the dailiness of Aitken’s format and used the volume over a period of years, sometimes decades, dating each entry and ignoring the original dates printed on each calendar page. A few fl ipped the volume upside down to distinguish among different kinds of entries or to differentiate notes for subsequent years.74 It’s difficult to generalize about some of these customers, for the ways in which they rejected Aitken’s format were so individualized. What is clear about their misuse of Aitken’s Register was their reluctance to submit to the regimen of this printed format. No matter how unique their treatment of Aitken’s product, they all could be categorized as diary resisters. That is in part why Aitken’s Register failed and why this period of the commercial diary is more foreshadowing than full-blown tale. Aitken’s was just the kind of accessory that appealed to men with a facility and infatuation with numbers. On the fi rst page of accounts, Ferdinand Coxe, a prominent Philadelphia landlord, struck out the numeral “3” in the heading 1773 and replaced it with a “4.” To add to the temporal confusion, his fi rst entries on that page appear to come from January 1775, recounting the interest he received that month from various debtors. For the second week’s account, he substituted 1773 with “1777” and so on. He continued in such fashion, adding accounts to the calendar pages in haphazard fashion for at least another decade, a testament to the durability of Aitken’s little book. An almanac would never have survived such usage. Tea dealer John Dunkin also kept his Aitken’s Register over a number of years, recording in it accounts up through 1783. Dunkin noted shipments of flour and sugar he’d delivered and pay-

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ments he had received for various goods. On an April accounts page, he recorded a “Memoranda of Goods sent to Coffe [sic] House” including “4 Carbines, 3 musquets, 100 6lb shot, 30 18lb do, 14 boxes, 7 kegs, 3 jars.” Toward the end of the diary section, Dunkin turned the volume upside down to distinguish entries he recorded in later years. Apparently, such customers had other ways of setting their lives in time. They didn’t need Aitken to do it for them. Instead, they converted the diary into fi nancial notebook, employing it over the course of a decade for recording the arrival of dry goods down at the docks, payments of rents on urban lots like one in Moravian Alley, and prices paid for everything from 6 pounds of raisins (“0.2.6”) to a “piece of chintz” (“14 dollars”).75 With paper at such a premium on the eve of the Revolution, Coxe and Dunkin used every inch of white space they could in the memoranda section. Because Aitken’s Register was sturdy and portable, it made sense that they would hold on to it and use it year after year. But their random entries meant that their copies of Aitken’s date book were less diaries than miniature account books, akin to George Nelson’s or Richard Peters’s. Even if they ignored the timing embedded in its pages, Coxe and Dunkin submitted to its promise of fi nancial control, inserting in great detail the myriad transactions of their commercial lives. Resistance to its calendar did not make Coxe and Dunkin immune to its influence. Consider, for instance, what Dunkin did to the title page of Aitken’s Register. Between the words Aitken’s and General American, Dunkin inserted his own name and added a possessive before Register. So the title page then read: “John Dunkin General American his Register, 1778.” Dunkin added another inscription on the back endleaf of the small volume: “John Dunkin his Book.” Coxe also left his signature on Aitken’s title page, below the word Register, and on the front endleaves wrote his name twice. On the right-hand page he added his address of “1308 Spruce St.” 76 These inscriptions were marks of ownership. They were practical, for the inscriptions allowed someone to return the diary to its rightful owner should it be lost. But they also represented the meaning buyers such as Coxe and Dunkin instilled in this material object, a personal as well as commercial artifact.77 Beyond the title page, Aitken’s accounts pages urged them to write down every exchange, every receipt, every expense, reminding them day after day, year after year, that they must keep account. A blank journal could not do that. As Aitken put it in his preface, “Business will make such a manual as this absolutely nec-

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essary,” suggesting that every businessman needed such a tool to take advantage of expanding commercial networks. Coxe and Dunkin prefigure the generation of Americans historian Patricia Cline Cohen examined in her foundational study of the rise of numeracy in Jacksonian America. “New economic, religious, and political ideas,” according to Cohen, “stimulated the spread of reckoning skills and contributed to the prestige of numbers and quantification, a prestige that had become very great by the antebellum decades.” While Cohen is most interested in charting larger trends such as the use of statistics and the expansion of the census, numeracy or a literacy of numbers began at home for most Americans where issues of the pocketbook required that one be conversant in matters of cash, credit, and currency.78 Coxe and Dunkin’s fi xation for reckoning was much more intimate, focused more on their own affairs than on matters of community or nation. They put their trust in numbers and assembled them, with the help of Aitken’s Register, into a representation of their commercial selves: in Coxe’s case as successful landlord and in Dunkin’s a thriving merchant. Coxe’s entries may look haphazard and disorganized, but they made sense to him and, in some ways, made sense of him. For if Coxe poured over its contents in retrospect, he would observe the scope of his achievements as a Philadelphia landlord. On March 20, 1784, he wrote: “Recd from Mr Henniken & others the first three quarters rent of my new store in front street . . . They being my fi rst tennants & enterd it ye 20th June 1783 at L150 . . . The rent now being L200 p annum by some additions to it.” Other notations simply list rents collected on various lots: “Received of Wm Stanley . . . 12.0.0 . . . Recd of Isac Crait . . . 18.0.0, of Robt Smith in full . . . 36.0.0, of Amt Hull Do 3.12.0.” From such notes, we cannot tell whether Coxe was a kindly landlord, but he was probably a wealthy one.79 Dunkin’s entries portray a busy merchant juggling a complex web of transactions with some real fi nesse. One note in particular illustrates just how complicated commerce in early America could be. Dunkin wrote down money owed him by a “Jno Phill” to settle an outstanding account. Phill paid him: “8 Joes . . . 1 Pence . . . 5 Guineas . . . 40 dolls.” Dunkin converted the currencies, noted what Phill had paid him previously, and tallied the sums at the bottom. Dunkin’s record is full of such conversions and other monetary transactions such as a reminder to “Go to Wager & Habacher & enquire of them if the [sic] have any Jersey State Money they woud wish to part with.” Dunkin wrote of tea deliver-

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ies, flour and sugar shipments, and the settling of clients’ accounts, demonstrating that he had on his hands a going concern. Dunkin’s preoccupation with numbers, in at least one instance, gave way to something more heartfelt. Even though the initial impetus for the entry appeared to be fi nancial, Dunkin embellished a notation regarding “Two yds. Chintz” sent to his wife Ann on “6 Nov.” with a small drawing that transformed a cold, numerical calculation into the realm of feelings. Below it, Dunkin drew a hollow heart and fi lled it with his and his wife’s initials.80 So besides being a prosperous merchant, Dunkin was a doting husband. Aitken’s text, despite its relatively “fi xed” form, was still malleable enough to allow for that kind of self-performance although, in the case of Dunkin and Coxe, constructed more often of numbers rather than words. *

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Offering only a glimpse of his heart in his Aitken’s Register, Dunkin nevertheless hinted at what was possible if one were to convert an account of business into a more full-fledged account of self. Such transformations were not unheard of among eighteenth-century American diarists. There are a handful of notable examples, including the decades-long records of Maine midwife Martha Ballard, Virginia planter Landon Carter, and Carter’s son Robert Wormeley Carter. The biographers of each admit that while their records may have begun as accounts of work or business, over time the writers embellished the entries and transformed the pages into something more personal and effusive.81 Historian Rhys Isaac demonstrates how such a progression occurred in the diaries of Colonel Landon Carter, manager of an extensive Virginia tobacco plantation and contemporary of Robert Aitken’s urban clientele. At the outset Carter’s plantation daybook, begun in a “handsome blank-bound quarto notebook” purchased for the recording of parliamentary procedures during his years as a Virginia legislator, consisted simply of “Farming Observations,” with little embellishment or narrative content. In time, Carter reconfigured his diary, incorporating a “wide variety of stories” that overwhelmed the initial project, allowing for a “much more comprehensive book of self.” And it was not as if Carter required the space of the “blank-bound quarto notebook” to inaugurate the switch, for Carter’s fi rst transformed diary volume was none other than an unclaimed 1766 “almanack” that he “examined . . . to see if it had been stampt, but

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fi nding none I ventured to set my name on it.” By 1770, according to Isaac, Carter had incorporated more than one hundred stories into the once-bland list of “observations” in his diary, including “medical narratives,” “family quarrels,” “neighborhood confl icts,” and “dramatic narrations of the weather.” Isaac concludes: “The performances of journal writing were evidently no longer constrained by the original workbook intentions.”82 Or, indeed, by the restricted format of the repository. The fact that an almanac could accommodate Carter’s expanded personal account raises the question of why so many of Aitken’s customers failed to treat his Register in the same way. It wasn’t as if no one was doing it, as Colonel Carter’s example suggests. Scholars, too, tell us that many eighteenth-century Americans, like their European counterparts, had the capacity to examine themselves. Even the conduct literature of the day encouraged self-reflection. In exploring the historical sources of modern identity, philosopher Charles Taylor identified its various facets. Among them was interiority, an appreciation that we have inner depths or “selves,” and the affi rmation of ordinary life, replacing higher realms of activity such as monasticism with the stuff of daily life such as work and family. Both of these characteristics of modern identity were emerging, though not yet fully realized by the time of the American Revolution, according to Taylor. What was most evident in this period was an emphasis on self- examination. In its religious sense, this practice of self-reflection was supposed to lead to spiritual redemption. Indeed, Protestant diaries had long been the receptacles of inner thoughts and feelings.83 However, this kind of introspection had taken on a secular cast as a vehicle for self-improvement. John Mason’s work titled Self-Knowledge: A Treatise, Shewing the Nature and Benefi t of That Important Science, and the Way to Attain It illustrates this emerging preoccupation. Writing in 1789, Mason set out to train young minds how to improve their memory and organize their thoughts to promote knowledge and a higher level of self-awareness. Mason told his readers that it was not enough that they had “good Thoughts,” they must also put them “in Order, digested or ranged under proper Subjects or Classes.” In addition, Mason advised, nothing helped the memory more than thinking and writing.84 While Mason was referring to the keeping of a commonplace book, customers may have had just those sorts of attainments in mind when they picked up a preformatted datebook like Robert Aitken’s. Its format imposed order on its owner’s thoughts on a daily basis. In a common-

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place book the user looked for mirrors in what others may have said, a diary such as Aitken’s suggested the reverse: the self is subject, and one’s own words and experiences are the story. With respect to the second characteristic of modern identity, what was Aitken’s Register but a repository of the mundane events and transactions of an ordinary life. Its owners used it to record work they had performed, goods they produced or purchased, debts they settled, and family events they witnessed. Aitken affi rmed the significance of those daily doings by giving each day its own predetermined space. He told his audience that nothing was too trivial for recording in his diary: You need not be thinking of Heaven to have something worth writing. Once again, it’s mystifying that so few of Aitken’s clients saw its potential, enlisting it for ordering their personal as well as their fi nancial lives. Only Scotsman James Wilson came close to appreciating the Register’s many benefits, though he never approached the extensive, selfreflexive narrative contained in the pages of Landon Carter’s diaries. With so few of Aitken’s customers utilizing his Annual Account Book and Calendar as a more personal diary, it might be tempting to dismiss that feature altogether, to admit that an account of self just wasn’t possible in something so regimented and brief. Yet the almanacs of Colonel Carter, his son Robert, as well as that of Aaron Wight’s (see chapter one) tell us that brevity had nothing to do with it. That brings us back to Aitken’s format, the element that sets it apart most from its almanac cousins. Perhaps it was the impersonality of print, the succession of daily spaces in the calendar that discouraged a user from inserting his or her more intimate reflections. To test that conclusion, we could examine the diary of Nichols Goddard, a twenty-one-year-old clockmaker’s apprentice who chose a daily planner similar to Aitken’s. Although it began as a record of work and expenses, Goddard’s diary evolved into a more personal and unique life account. Instead of a blank journal or almanac, Goddard chose a memorandum book imported from England and titled the Ladies New Royal Pocket Companion. Obviously, Goddard may have not had much to choose from at the local bookshop, having recorded paying just over 2 shillings to Simeon Butler “For Ladies pocket book.” Work was central to Goddard’s record keeping. Goddard began the year working for his cousin, Luther Goddard, who manufactured clocks in his shop in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. On February 2, 1795, Goddard wrote that he had “Finished one eight day alarm clock movement for Luther

Figure 2.5. Even though Nichols Goddard’s 1795 Ladies New Royal Pocket Companion began as a record of work, it evolved into a more personal and unique life account. Image courtesy of the Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.

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Goddard” and two days later fi nished three more movements he had already begun. But Luther did not have enough work to keep the young journeyman busy, forcing Goddard to move on. On February 5, he wrote: “Left Shrewsbury and went to Westboro—agree to work for G Parker at 7 dol a movement.”85 When he had fi nished his work for Gardner Parker in early April, Goddard recorded his pay (“Received of G: Parker— hat and waistcoat 11/ charge for my work.”). Goddard took work wherever he could get it. He used his diary to keep track of the jobs he had scrounged and the pay that made its way into his pocket. On one return to Westborough, he “cleand Parkmans and Brighams Clocks” for cash. In May he was in Northampton where he “Cast for I. Gere Tuck Wheel for B. Prescott.” Goddard also found some space in the diary to list the formula for cutting teeth for a pinion, a small wheel that meshes with a larger wheel in a clock movement, and a recipe for making brass out of copper and zinc: “take 4 parts of Copper and melt it. then put in one part of zink. pound it out once before you cast it for use.”86 Rather than subverting the format, Goddard enhanced it. In his hands it was more than just account book or reference manual. As busy as Goddard was in search of work, he managed to fi nd time for other interests. In his diary, he wrote of visits to “meting” and “singing school” or his participation in a “Squirrel Hunt.” The pages were very restricted, with never enough room for more than a sentence or two even if he was judicious with his pen. But, when so inclined, Goddard wrote more, ignoring the lines and moving into the margins. As he became more accustomed to writing every day, he began to innovate, recording more than simply his whereabouts or his work for that day. One entry betrayed a sense of self-consciousness, the others his involvement in the wider community. On June 6, he wrote: “A tooth drew by Clark the fi rst I ever had drew.” In the midst of his travels back and forth to Westborough, Northampton, and Shrewsbury, Goddard recorded on April 28 that the “Supreme Court setts here” and on May 27 “General Election at Boston.” Earlier that May, he recounted two incidents that must have set local tongues wagging: “An Indian sets on gallows 1 hand branded M for manslaughter” and “Youngs a Clockmaker with another man stand in pillory 1 hour whipped 20 lashes each for money making Youngs sets off for the Castle for 3 years.”87 The pilloried clockmaker must have hit especially close to home for the young journeyman, though he failed to say as much in his memo book. While Goddard willingly adhered to many of the regulations set out in the commercial diary as he fi lled in

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the spaces set aside for his expenses and dutifully recorded his travels related to work and business, he also found room for other kinds of additions, more personal than Aitken might have envisioned. All combined to make a unique account of a young clockmaker interested in the events around him as much as in his efforts to make a living. Goddard may have been more comfortable with a format such as Aitken’s because he was a generation removed from Aitken’s clientele. As Aitken prepared to introduce his new diary to the American public in 1772, Goddard was not yet born. The Pocket Companion Goddard purchased was published for 1795. But Goddard’s age wasn’t the only thing that set him apart. Another factor was status or rank: Goddard was a workingman. As he set down his daily record, Goddard appeared shrewd in negotiating pay for his piecework and ambitious in the way he struggled for advancement. Most of Aitken’s clients were wealthier, more established elites accustomed perhaps to other modes of record keeping than a humble pocket book. But it may have been more than that. Goddard’s embrace of his daily planner pointed toward the future rather than the past, of trusting in print and accommodating oneself to the printed page that might have felt like a transgression or betrayal to Aitken’s customers. Goddard’s experience seems not just a generation removed but worlds away from revolutionary Philadelphia where patrons held dearly to old habits and forms in hopes of keeping all that they knew from overturning. Goddard had little in common with Aitken customers such as Joshua Howell and Thomas Mease, farmers who treated Aitken’s Register as they might an almanac. Howell and Mease clung to a more traditional, and time-tested, approach to record keeping. They ignored completely the accounting functions of Aitken’s Register and viewed it instead as they might the blank pages inserted in an almanac. Their entries consisted mainly of the daily weather and lists of the vegetables they had planted. Joshua Howell sometimes neglected words, choosing simply to write down the temperatures throughout a given day. The week of July 4, 1773, he recorded: 4 Cloudy about noon Pulld Early corn 5 84

89.

6 7 Hot & dry

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8 Continued Hot 9 10 88 93 at 11 oClock continued Hot & dry.

Many pages are missing in Howell’s diary. Perhaps he tore them out on his own to use as receipts or for shopping lists. Howell used the accounts pages of his Register only once. Either he did not have a use for them or he recorded his fi nancial transactions elsewhere. Or perhaps he managed to keep all the figures in his head. On a December accounts page, Howell noted that he had “Advanced Decr 9 Henry Lieber Twenty Shillings To Encourage Him To Set up the Linnen & Cotton Printing.”88 This entry indicates Howell was more than just a farmer, although he left no further clues to his identity in Aitken’s pages. Either immune or resistant to Aitken’s instruction, Howell reverted to a more familiar record-keeping form—that of an almanac. Mease may have borrowed his Register from a parent who never fi lled in the diary pages. He used it many years after its publication, replacing the date “1773” with “1789” on the title page. Like Howell, Mease converted his diary into a gardening book, recording the weather on the accounts pages and the vegetables he had planted on the memoranda pages opposite. One week in May, Mease wrote on an accounts page: “A great deal of rain the 11.12.&13. May &14&15.” On the facing page beside May 10 and 11, he recorded that he “Transplanted 100 Colly Flowers” and “Planted abt. 50 Early Cabbages.” Little else about Mease is evident from his entries, except perhaps that he was of school age. Mease may have been congratulating himself on July 3 when he noted that “I got through my Latin grammer.”89 That is the only self-directed entry Mease left. To our eyes, their entries do not add up to much. We cannot reconstruct their identities from such circumspect comments. With the exception of Mease’s “Latin grammer” entry and Howell’s remark about setting up the “Linnen & Cotton Printing,” their diaries could have been just about anyone’s. Mease and Howell may have ignored the Register’s accounts pages because they did not need them. Why shell out 4.6 for Aitken’s planner when you could satisfy all your recording needs at a fraction of the price? Aitken’s was a pretty expensive almanac. Or perhaps they were most interested in tables contained in the Register portion. Their material lives may have been less rich and far less compli-

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cated than Coxe’s or Wilson’s. However, that still does not explain why they limited their comments to the weather and the state of their vegetables. It does not mean that they had no sense of self or any degree of selfconsciousness. It’s possible that, like George Nelson, Mease and Howell kept a separate diary consisting of blank sheets or a blank journal. There they might have written longer of visits to kin or lessons completed, and other personal events. Most likely, then, they wrote as they did because their understanding of Aitken’s printed diary was informed by more traditional recordkeeping modes. When they used Aitken’s Register, they did not follow Aitken’s vision forward. Instead, they looked backward to forms they knew, forms more familiar and less overtly expressive. What they had in mind was an interleaved almanac. The almanac was, after all, an astrological calendar meant—among other functions—to aid farmers in tracking the coming and going of the seasons and the best times to sow. The diary pages in an almanac were blank, untarnished by any text or predetermined format. Mease and Howell and other Aitken customers may have had to come to terms with this new role of print.90 Never before had an American publisher invited them to insert daily diary entries, the stuff of every day, into a printed grid. It may have required an understanding of print that Mease and Howell did not possess. *

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The distance between men’s and women’s diary keeping in this period was not great, perhaps because such diarists had more to bind them than divide them. Many female diarists were educated and exceptionally literate, as well off as their male counterparts. Some scholars look at eighteenth-century diaries anachronistically and assume that women wrote of their private selves and men of their public doings.91 Publishers did perceive differences in the record-keeping needs of men and women, or they would not have published for the female buyer her own Ladies Book. Men were supposed to use the pocket diary for business, women as a register of consumption and for the engagements of leisure. Different subject matters, certainly, but women’s diaries in this period were no more private than men’s.92 And in the case of Aitken’s new diary, men and women seemed equally unwilling or unable to give themselves over to the printed format. London publishers had already tapped the female market with great

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success, but Aitken did not follow suit, perhaps the numbers on Aitken’s side of the Atlantic were still too small to justify such pandering. Aitken never made a version of his diary expressly for women even though such an item—like his Register—had long been available in England. Barely a year after Robert Dodsley introduced his New Memoranda Book to British audiences, Thomas Carnan published The Ladies Complete Pocket Book for 1750.93 The accounts and diary section of the Ladies Book were nearly identical to those offered to men, but the reference manual was replaced with a selection of literary essays, poems, and songs resembling a prefabricated commonplace book. The decorative engravings on the frontispiece depicting women in fi ne dress and displaying the fashionable “Head-dresses” of a given year were another appealing element of its design.94 The diary was intended for a fashionable consumer and lady of leisure, who might need it to mark appointments but might just as readily lounge around, perusing its poetical contents. Although there is evidence that at least one woman, poet Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, purchased his Register, Aitken did not go out of his way to appeal to the ladies. Aitken may have felt there was no market for a Ladies Book in the colonies. An American version of the Ladies Pocket Book would not debut until 1797, leaving American women in Aitken’s day to rely on imports or versions geared toward men.95 Indeed, Aitken recorded in his waste book a sale of his Register to American poetess Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. It’s possible that when someone like John Penn or William Shaker walked out of Aitken’s shop with two Registers in hand, they delivered the extra copy to their wives.96 Female customers might have turned it into a virtual almanac as Mease and Howell did, or treated it as Wilson did, as an indispensable record of his own daily activities. Unfortunately, there is not much to go on to answer the question defi nitively with respect to Aitken’s pocket book. Fergusson’s copy has not survived, nor has any other that can be attributed to a woman. Nevertheless, the records British women left hold clues to how Fergusson and other elite women in British America may have taken to the new format. Like men, their willingness to embrace the printed diary depended greatly on their participation in the commercial world that produced it. And there were many women in the American colonies entrenched in such fi nancial transactions, as Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor so eloquently illustrates in her recent study of women living in the revolutionary-era cities of Newport, Rhode Island, and Charlestown, South Carolina.

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American women, according to Hartigan-O’Connor, were “active members of urban economic life” who participated daily in all sorts of fi nancial and monetary transactions either through intermediaries or representing themselves.97 The more well-to-do set of Hartigan-O’Connor’s study were not far removed from the world of Elizabeth Shackleton, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three recently widowed and living in the north of England. When Shackleton walked out of her local stationer with a memo book akin to Aitken’s in hand, she did so because she needed it. Shackleton used her pocket diary as thoroughly as James Wilson used his Aitken’s Register. Shackleton lived in the midst of a world of goods that needed ordering and a bustling household that required managing. The Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book helped her do that. In 1758, Shackleton, then Elizabeth Parker, was left widowed with three young sons. Six years later, she met and married a man eighteen years her junior, a woolen merchant named John Shackleton. She lived with her newly constituted family on an estate in northern England until her death in 1781. We know a great deal about Shackleton’s daily routines thanks to a cache of pocket diaries she purchased annually to aid in the running of her household. She bought the same diary each year: The Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book. In a detailed study of Shackleton’s diaries from the 1760s and 1770s, historian Amanda Vickery observed that Shackleton transformed her printed diaries into “personal reference manuals on the mechanics of keeping house.” Shackleton recorded every purchase, tracked servants and their duties, and cross-referenced her entries to letters, other accounts, and receipts so precisely that her furniture accounts jibed with the sales ledgers of the fi rms from which she purchased the items. She kept close track of products and prices, noting, for example: “Bought a small quantity of Mackrell at three pence a pound from Preston. I never saw any in Lancashire but once before.” 98 How Shackleton came to use her diary depended also on her familiarity with the form. Mease and Howell may have never seen anything like Aitken’s Register before. Like Mease and Howell, an American diarist by the name of Alice Bunting used her 1803 Ladies Pocket Book as she might an almanac, marking spring’s new arrivals with the entries “First Crocus” and “Kate calved” on a March memoranda page. As further proof that Bunting associated her printed diary with the older record-keeping form, she left an inscription on the back page of the

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printed volume that read “Alice Bunting, her Almanac.” 99 For Shackleton, there was no such confusion. The format to her was old hat, and she used it accordingly in all its practical applications. And as so often happened with a format that foregrounded one’s day-to-day life, the diary became much more than a mere account book. Because her Ladies Pocket Book served to record the personal and unique events of her days, it came to represent something of herself. In it Shackleton boasted of her managerial skills, keeping close tabs on her servants, as in recording that she found old Luce Smith “sciming Milk Bowles & drinking the Cream” and “Betty Crooke Makeing Coffee & breaking white sugar to drink with it—Servants come to a high hand indeed. What will become of poor House Keepers?”100 Shackleton’s diaries depict a savvy consumer and methodical household manager always alert to servants on the make. Even though she used her diaries to keep accounts, she was a resister, too; for, unmoved by the version of the lady of leisure presented by the printed diary, Shackleton adapted the genteel Ladies Pocket Book to construct her own identity. Her diary became as much an account of herself as an account of her household. Shackleton and other customers needed no instruction on how to keep a diary. Aitken and other publishers gave customers all the direction they needed, embedded in the date book’s format. Unlike letter writing, there were no manuals for diary keeping in this period. Record keeping was not among the topics mentioned in the period’s conduct manuals.101 In an extensive preface, the publisher of The British Ladies . . . Memorandum Book suggested to his female clientele how the diary should be used. He even went so far as to provide a sample accounts entry including sums paid to a “Mrs. Muslin,” a “Mr. Instep,” and a “Mrs. Fashion,” poking fun at a lady’s penchant for the latest styles. He went on to recommend that his customers preserve “these Books, as they may be of Use even Years after, to have Recourse to on many Occasions; and will always enable any Lady to tell what Monies she has Received and Paid; what Appointments, or visits, she has made and had returned, during any Period of her Life.”102 Diary keeping, according to these publishers, was gendered but not in the way we might think. Both men’s and women’s versions were records of a public life—men writing of work, women of appointments and social engagements—as well as records of consumption. If any element distinguished the two versions, it was the perception that a woman had more leisure, allowing her time to sit and read the literary selections in the

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diary’s pages. But perception is one thing, and reality another. Surely, Elizabeth Shackleton had little time for leisurely reading. A Philadelphia native, Mrs. Robert Montgomery may have picked up her diary, The British Ladies Complete Pocket Memorandum Book, for the Year 1770, while living abroad. In December 1769, Montgomery’s husband, a captain on the ship Harmony, left his pregnant wife in Lisbon, Portugal, and sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar on a voyage to the Mediterranean. Montgomery felt her diary worth preserving, but not for the reasons the publisher set out in his preface. Unlike Shackleton, Montgomery had no use for the accounts pages. Instead, the diary became a record of perhaps her most difficult year, one in which she lost her husband and her eldest son within months of each other. Next to Wednesday, May 9, 1770, Montgomery wrote: “at 2 O’Clock this day was inform’d of my Husband’s death, by Mr. and Mrs. Parr at their House in Valformoza . . . I pray god support me in my affl iction.” The time of day also figured prominently in the recording of her son’s death, as she lamented on August 11: “this evening between 6 & 7 o’clock had the shocking account of my dear Childs death, the arrival of my Sister Dunn & Sally in an hour after confi rm’d the distressing news to be too true.” Montgomery’s daily accounting fulfi lled a more emotional need, a role wholly unanticipated by its publisher. In one instance, she even recalled a disturbing dream she had had: “dream’d a very disagreeable affair of Mr. Montgomery last night concerning me.” Was it a premonition of her husband’s death? It’s difficult to know why she bought the diary in the fi rst place. Before tragedy struck, Montgomery mostly jotted down the letters she received from her husband or where she had dined on a particular evening. But once her trials began, her entries moved inward, substituting her innermost thoughts for outside events. She summed up the year in one of her last entries: “this day last year my Husband left me in Lisbon & He saild up the Straits & I never seen him after. melancholy circumstance & truely distressing to me.”103 Montgomery could have chosen a less restrictive format and written in a more unfettered fashion. This diary was not designed for lengthy entries in which diarists might write expressively. Montgomery could have purchased a blank journal or composed lengthier entries on single sheets. However, as Montgomery was in transit about to return to Philadelphia on a lengthy sea voyage following her husband’s death, she may have needed to travel light. Perhaps she sacrificed space for the portability of the little book. Keeping it close to her side, she could retrieve the diary

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from her pocket aboard ship and relive the last months of her husband’s life. Or she may have had other, more fundamental, reasons for choosing this printed format that limited one’s entries to a mere two lines per day. Apparently, some women were uncomfortable writing in this selfreflective mode, worrying that it demonstrated a level of self-indulgence unbecoming in a Christian. Mehetable Amory, a Boston diarist, said as much in the preface to a journal she began in 1811. She confessed: “I have sometimes thought that this mode of writing might possibly produce—a stronger propencity to ‘self-love’ . . . and as I have more tendency that way in myself than my reason could justify, I have been sorry to furnish any means to increase it.”104 Amory may not have been alone. Another indication of the daily planner’s versatility, other women resisted the diary impulse altogether and transformed them into commonplace books.105 Considering the design of The Ladies Pocket Book as a compendium of verses, songs, epigrams, and other elements one might inscribe in a commonplace book, the fact that women transcribed their own additions was to be expected. In 1797, Caroline Keith of Pittsford, Vermont, transcribed recipes for “Lemon Pudding” and “Calves feet Jelly” in her copy of The Ladies’ Own Memorandum Book . . . Designed as a Methodical Register of all Transactions of Business, as Well as Amusement.106 One unidentified diarist turned her Ladies Pocket Book into an autograph book when a friend wrote across the ruled lines of January’s account page: “A thousand tender things to mind I call / For those who truely love remember all / Delighted with the accounts of thy tongue / Upon thy words with Silent Joy I’ve Sung.” The friend then signed it, “Lxxx Nancy Haggons.”107 The chronology of the printed diary was lost on them. Its usage, for them, was unconnected to time and served only as a receptacle for others’ words, not their own. Commonplace books were often used as a mode of education for both boys and girls in this period. In a 1750 letter to her daughter in Philadelphia, Deborah Hill agreed with her decision to have “my dear little girls . . . taught at home” and vowed that “the instruction . . . will ground them in a good hand, which they may keep if they write a copy or two a day.” A number of the eighteenth-century commonplace books in today’s archives were kept as school exercises.108 Given a Ladies Pocket Book as a birthday or New Year’s gift, a young diarist might have devoured its contents like a novel and stored it away on a shelf, or it could have been a companion to other reading, which explains the insertion of poetical or

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gastronomic miscellany. These female users did not need the pocket diary to juggle servants or to manage a household like Elizabeth Shackleton’s. What they owned—fi ne dresses, hair combs, or silk gloves—was purchased for them by their parents. It might be years before they could see the virtues or need of writing of oneself in such a little book. Amory, after all, began her diary in middle age. There are plenty of other reasons why women may have left these diaries blank. Literacy rates for women in this period, especially writing literacy, were still lower than men’s. And the women who could write often complained that their writing skills were inadequate or too rudimentary to engage in correspondence or other literary pursuits. Even Abigail Adams complained of her “unliterateness” to her friends and daughters.109 Time also put a stranglehold on women’s ability to keep diaries. Esther Edwards Burr routinely referred to feeling pressed by other duties: “I write just when I can get time. My dear you must needs think I cant get much, for I hav my Sally to tend, and domesteck affairs to see to, and company to wait of besides my sewing, [so] that I am really hurried.”110 According to Aitken’s store records, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson was the only woman we know of who purchased a copy of his Aitken’s Register. Fergusson may have used it as a repository for literary extracts, a tiny version of commonplace.111 Or perhaps she needed it for the same reasons Elizabeth Shackleton did: to manage servants and the operations of an entire household. Or maybe she eschewed its accounting functions and, like Alice Bunting, transformed it into “her almanac,” recording garden and weather notes. It could also have served a deeper purpose as it did for Mrs. Robert Montgomery for whom it became an outlet for grief. The possibilities are as varied as they were for the men who purchased Aitken’s Register. *

*

*

Aitken hoped that his Register would make a name for himself. When it debuted, the Register announced Aitken’s prowess as printer and publisher in a competitive American marketplace. He felt he was giving his new American customers something the times called for, essential for the demands of colonial commerce. More than mere almanac, this diary innovation could set him apart from his competitors and, with any luck, make some money besides. Aitken saw (wrongly, it turned out) an opening in the American publishing market, and he took it. He aimed his

Figure 2.6. This 1779 Aitken broadside demonstrates how central printing and bookbinding were to Aitken’s business. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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product at the elite of Anglo-American society—the provincial gentry— and sold it as a fi nely crafted business accessory. His customers may have also appreciated the diary’s claim of independence as an American product. Yet all symbolism aside, Aitken intended it to be used primarily as an account book and reference guide. In the end, Aitken had a tough sell. Aitken’s printed book allowed its users to bear witness to outside events, to record time’s passage, to mark their participation in a expanding world of economic exchange. But few realized its full potential. Wilson did manage to do all those things and, in writing them down every day, constructed his own identity. However, the printed grid was no guarantee that users would read the Register in the same way. Mease and Howell were immune to the power of Aitken’s design, swayed by older forms than the newer one in front of them. In the late 1700s these diary resisters were the norm rather than the exception. Their use was guided by necessity, and they had no use for Aitken’s “method.” It wasn’t enough that Aitken’s Register was an object of gentility, a purchasable symbol of one’s status. For Aitken’s Register to succeed, buyers had to sense a need for it, and many did not—at least not yet. Aitken’s timing was hopelessly off, the fi nal insult memorialized on a single line in his shop accounts: “4 Aitken’s Register returned.”112 That was the last mention of Aitken’s American diary. At that moment, hostilities with England were heating up. He put out another Register for 1774, minus the memo section, and then abandoned the venture altogether after that. His reasons had as much to do with production challenges as with lagging demand. It was not a good time, after all, to introduce a new diary to the American public. In October 1773, due to the contraction of British credit, there were “daily accounts of heavy failures among the Shopkeepers” in Philadelphia.113 Aitken did not want to be among them. Publishing was an expensive proposition, especially when the market for a new product was not a sure thing. And Aitken was soon preoccupied with other publishing schemes for which payment and audience were guaranteed. On the back page of his 1774 Register, Aitken announced the publication of his Pennsylvania Magazine, whose contributors included Thomas Paine and Francis Hopkinson. Because the Pennsylvania Magazine was sold by subscription, Aitken was sure from the outset that he would recoup his investment. In addition, the Continental Congress hired Aitken in the fall of 1776 to publish the Congress’s journals and promised to purchase five hundred copies when it

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was completed.114 Aitken had plenty of work to keep him busy and his press occupied and did not have to risk his own funds by continuing to publish his Register. The war was not the only thing in the way of the success of Aitken’s Register. As did any colonial publisher in this period, Aitken had to overcome great obstacles to produce a book.115 The fi rst was paper. Paper continued to be scarce in the American colonies throughout this period, and what was available was very expensive. In an advertising broadside, Aitken offered “The Highest Price given . . . for Clean Linen Rags,” which could be converted into fi ne quality paper.116 The high price of paper contributed to the high cost of production and meant that the price of Aitken’s Register was out of reach for all but the wealthiest colonists. And although Aitken relied on bulk sales to booksellers in the surrounding region, his distribution network was limited and again prevented him from reaching a wider audience.117 Aitken’s Register would never reach Boston, for instance, unless a congressional delegate like John Adams took it home with him. All of these factors posed a challenge to Aitken’s production aims. It is difficult to blame Aitken for those things over which he had no control. Yet Aitken’s biggest hurdle in the case of his Register was not production, but demand. And this is where he miscalculated. Few apparently wanted what Aitken was selling. He had no idea how stubborn the American public could be when it came to their record-keeping habits. Most of them just didn’t appreciate what Aitken was attempting to do. They preferred an almanac to the ultraluxe calendar Aitken was peddling. His customers said so plainly when they urged Aitken to omit the diary section in his 1774 Register. Aitken was battling a mindset in which older, more traditional forms were sufficient. Many colonists had not yet been pulled into the network of commercial exchanges for this kind of tool to make sense to them, and few besides Wilson needed to set up appointments or reminders days or weeks ahead of time. They had no need to plan ahead. As far as numbers were concerned, they could keep the figures in their heads or jot the calculations in their interleaved almanacs.118 Their record-keeping choices were dictated by need and familiarity. These diary resisters saw no utility in a printed volume that divided their years into equal parts and asked for a personal entry each day. Aitken’s customers also may have felt they were giving up a degree of autonomy in submitting themselves to his regimented calendar. A diarist like Aaron Wight (see chapter one) may have felt no qualms insert-

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ing notes on the blank pages of an almanac. After all, it was something he made up on his own. But he might have objected to fi lling in a grid dictated by a printer, someone he did not know and who knew nothing of his record-keeping needs. Another of Aitken’s missteps was his restricted audience. No matter how attractive Aitken may have made his Register, it was not meant for every man, let alone every woman. Unlike the day’s almanacs, its audience, as Aitken intended, was exclusive. The price of Aitken’s Register placed the memoranda book beyond reach for most. At those prices, Aitken intended his Register to be as much genteel accessory as business tool. Aitken sold his customers on the exclusivity of this utility. By taking Aitken’s Register out of their pockets in public, his customers set themselves apart from the unenlightened and poor souls still recording their daily notes on the blank pages crudely stitched in their almanacs. If he wanted to make his venture a success, Aitken needed a product more universal, more like an almanac. He aimed his Register at a select slice of Philadelphia society, one that could easily afford a pricey, leatherbound calendar, but their excess income meant his clientele had plenty of other options and could purchase larger, hardbound journals for their accounts or diaries. If he had wanted to expand its reach, Aitken could have trimmed the contents, substituted cheaper bindings, or shrunk the calendar to make it more affordable to a wider audience. Despite Aitken’s setback, the reception of his Register does offer hints of the format’s future potential. Many who bought Aitken’s book took from it a new appreciation for the every day. Aitken’s approach affirmed the significance of the mundane, the ordinary in their lives, and made it worth preserving. Whether they were recording a visit to a courthouse or the purchase of a new pair of gloves, no matter was too trivial for this pocket book. At the end of the year, they had a record of their accounts as well as an account of their days. Aitken marketed his Register as account book, but it became—for a select few—an account of self. They allowed it to guide their view of time, of money, of America, and of themselves. Aitken’s printed grid also freed diarists from the burden of the blank page. These diarists did not have to be angst-fi lled, self-probing Puritans to chronicle themselves in Aitken’s Register. Aitken did not ask his customers to feel worthy (or sufficiently unworthy) to warrant a diary like his. Aitken’s impetus was commercial, not spiritual. Yet his diary afforded men and women a space for themselves in little time. The beauty

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of Aitken’s format was that the space reserved for daily entries was so small it did not require much time to fi ll. Aitken’s Register made such an account of self easy—easy to buy, easy to carry, easy to write. And soon the expanding consumer economy would mean that more individuals would need such records. But it would be Aitken’s successors and their customers who reaped the benefits of Aitken’s innovation and realized the potential in his daily diary. Aitken paid a high price for his ambitious endeavors. While his Register did not break him, another publishing fi rst almost did. In 1777, Aitken submitted a bid to the Continental Congress to publish the fi rst complete English Bible in the colonies for use by patriot families. Preoccupied by more pressing matters, the Congress did not approve the measure until 1782. Again, the problem for Aitken was timing. But in this case, Aitken was too late instead of too early. By the time Aitken’s “Bible of the Revolution” was published, the war had ended and imports of cheaper Dutch Bibles resumed, dampening demand for Aitken’s more luxe, local version. Aitken maintained his reputation as “a most excellent workman,” esteemed as a bookbinder, publisher, and printer even in the most difficult times. He lost money in currency and land speculation and struggled to stay in business during the depressed times following the Revolution. In 1797, Aitken confessed to being “pinched beyond measure, Unable to purchase a R[ea]m of paper to retail in my Shop.” Four years later, he sought to unload his print shop and his press to the highest bidder in an advertisement in the Philadelphia Aurora in an attempt to scale back his struggling operation to bookbinding and bookselling. Aitken managed to survive and passed his business on to his daughter, Jane, after his death in 1802. He was remembered in the United States Gazette as “a respectable inhabitant of this city; through the whole of a useful life regarded for his integrity and probity; and leaving behind him a family, carefully brought up in the paths of industry and virtue.”119 What the obituary writer overlooked was Aitken’s vision. Another generation of publishers would benefit from Aitken’s foresight. They were treading along a path that Aitken had worn for them. At the same time Aitken was complaining about being unable to afford a ream of paper, a Philadelphia publisher named William Young Birch introduced his customers to The Gentlemen’s Annual Pocket Remembrancer and The American Ladies Pocket Book, both of which owed much to Aitken’s original design.120 These little volumes, unlike Aitken’s, had staying power and a wider reach. In fact, three years af-

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ter Birch introduced his new pocket book, a thirty-two-year-old John Quincy Adams, accustomed to writing notes in an interleaved almanac, bought Birch’s Remembrancer for 1800 that then traveled with him on a diplomatic mission to Prussia.121 Nevertheless, putting aside notable American presidents and their writing rituals, the pocket diary would no longer be just an accessory of the rich and well educated. For many ordinary Americans of humble origin, middling income, and scant education, it soon became a necessity. The same product that Aitken’s clients rejected ended up in the homes of diarists in New England as well as New York and Philadelphia and was published annually for many years to come. In the new century, Americans of all walks of life would come to appreciate this daily diary that, with modest effort, made every day one’s own.

Chapter Three

The Profits of an Abbreviated Self

S

usan Brown is not the kind of writer we think of when we recall great American diarists. She did not fit the mold. She never set foot on the Overland Trail. She wasn’t at war. She was no transcendentalist. She had no literary aspirations. She might even admit that she did not have much worth writing about. Yet she left an incredible record spanning seven decades of her life from the 1840s and into a new century. Although her words were spare, she wrote nearly every day for sixty-five years. And when illness near the end of her life prevented her from completing her daily ritual, she asked a companion to fi ll in the days for her. It’s a record she might not have kept if not for the daily planners she bought every year that made diary keeping so simple.1 It began in January 1843. As the eighteen-year-old Brown stepped off the stagecoach in Lowell, Massachusetts, to start her new life as a weaver in the Middlesex Mills, she brought along the Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum, for 1843. More pocket diary than almanac, the commercial product was typical of the blank books that succeeded in the generation after Aitken’s bust. No fancy binding, just a tinted paper cover that doubled as a title page. Slimmer and more utilitarian than Aitken’s fi ne Registers, the Lowell Almanac stuck to essentials: a monthly calendar with the usual astronomical notes such as sunrises and sunsets and moon’s phases, postal rates, eclipse table, a local business directory with a handy list of boardinghouses, and a diary section that divided the year into weeks with each page beginning on Sunday under the heading “Appointments, Bills due, Notes due, and occasional Mem.” Perhaps a parting gift from her family, Brown’s Lowell Almanac was soon indispensable. She began her account just four days before entering the mill with the following words: “Am to leave tomorrow

Figure 3.1. The title page of Susan Brown’s 1843 Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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for Lowell—to board at Wm Stickneys & work in Middlesex Mills with his daughters.” What may have begun as a necessary task to help Brown manage her modest monthly wages quickly became a daily compulsion. 2 Dozens of Americans just like Brown caught the diary bug long before they had anything to write about, such as seeking their fortune at Sutter’s Mill or fighting rebels in the Civil War. Most never intended to accumulate a life record. They did so inadvertently. They purchased a ready-made diary for one reason or another: to track time or expenses, aid the memory, record appointments, or encourage self-discipline. Before they knew it, they were answering the diary’s suggestion to write every day, to fi ll in the blanks with a word or two, maybe even a phrase to sum up the day. As the pages piled up, they soon realized the benefits. They were accidental diarists. As early as the 1820s, the turnaround in the portable diary’s popularity was already evident. One had only to pick up an issue of Boston’s weekly newspapers to fi nd someone seeking the return of his diary. Barely an issue of the Columbian Centinel was published without an advertisement announcing another lost pocket book. Their owners lost them “in the Market,” at “the Long Wharf,” “in or near the Theatre,” “in the vicinity of Boylston Market,” at “Rev. Mr. Murray’s MeetingHouse,” or somewhere “between Fort-hill and Pomroy’s tavern.” Some even estimated what time they misplaced it—“Last Evening between the hours of 9 and 10”—as if that modern detail would speed its return. 3 It was as if the advertisers did not appreciate how invaluable their records had become until they were lost. Diarists like James Connell who, on a late fall evening in 1826, paid his toll at the Boston end of the Boston and Roxbury mill dam and walked on past the Common toward his house in Bromfield’s Lane. When he arrived home, he realized he’d left something behind. Maybe it slipped from his pocket after paying the toll, or perhaps he didn’t secure it fi rmly enough in his coat before continuing the brisk walk home. He placed an advertisement that Wednesday in the Columbian Centinel, hoping some stranger had stumbled upon it and might return it to him. The headline—all in caps—read: “POCKET BOOK LOST.” But this was no wallet. What Connell and many of his contemporaries referred to as a pocket book was really a diary, a memoranda book bound in a fold-over leather case that formed a pocket with the book’s back cover. In that pocket, Connell had stashed “eight dollars in bank bills, three of the bills being of the Norfolk Bank of five dollars each . . . [and] a note of William W. Russell of Plymouth N.H. for nine

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dollars fi fty cents.” The fi nder would know it was his since Connell had written his name “with a lead pencil on the fi rst leaf of the memoranda book on the inside.” Connell promised whoever returned it a hefty reward and “the thanks of the owner, to whom it is a great loss.”4 What these advertisements tell us is that in the half-century after Aitken’s clientele rebuffed his Register, the daily planner had become indispensable to a new generation of users. A virtual diary explosion had occurred by the mid-nineteenth century in America that preceded those events we tend to think of as responsible for a rising wave of diary keeping, events such as the Gold Rush and the Civil War. It was this humble stationery product, in part, that made this possible. The publishing industry had grown up, experiencing, according to some historians, a printing revolution that made consumer items like the pocket diary more affordable and accessible to a wider range of Americans. Taking advantage of new printing technologies, entrepreneurs created an industry that churned out ready-made facsimiles for everything from account books and autograph albums to scrapbooks and weather records. 5 Diaries were a large part of that commercial market. One publisher signaled the growing audience on his title page, stating that the Pocket Diary was “for registering events of Past or Present Occurrence, for the use of Manufacturers, Housekeepers, Merchants, Mechanics, and Professional Men.”6 This was not Aitken’s genteel crowd. Not simply a matter of an enterprising book trade, the daily planner’s increasing popularity hinged on a new, more expansive, clientele of men and, most notably, women: mill workers, clerks, chambermaids, schoolchildren, and more. What began as an accessory for merchants and businessmen was soon discovered by a range of users for whom it was never intended. Unlike Aitken’s patrons, these customers had come to terms with the prefabricated diary alongside other products of the commercial market. In fact, owning a mass-produced diary represented their participation in a commercial “culture of abundance.” 7 Not only did their purchase signal their willingness to consume, it became a detailed record of their consumption. Both ornament and instrument, the daily planner represented their taste, like a stylish ready-to-wear suit of clothes, as well as their strivings for success as it helped manage their bulging pocketbooks (the kind that held money). The pocket diary was the tool of an aspiring middle class, eager to achieve the fi nancial riches of commercial capitalism. Instead of resisting the new possibilities of the market, these customers simply sought ways to harness it.8

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Nevertheless, the pocket diary’s reach had its limits and remained an urban phenomenon until after the Civil War. Its urban bias was evident in its very makeup. When taxidermist John Bell accompanied naturalist John James Audubon on an expedition to Missouri in 1843, the Diary he carried with him from New York had reserved no space for Sundays since the publisher assumed it would be used primarily for business. That forced Bell to innovate, appropriating room in the diary pages before his March 11 departure to recording the events of consecutive Sundays on the expedition. Such design constraints might help explain the relative scarcity of commercial diaries in collections of Western Americana. Even though one would think the portability and order of the daily planner would make it the perfect traveling companion, its urban character and abbreviated format may have discouraged customers seeking a more suitable and open-ended repository for the recording of such a monumental event. Oftentimes, Gold Rush veterans and other western travelers admitted discarding their pocket diaries once their stories had been copied into a fancier, hardbound journal more worthy of preservation. In addition, there was also a question of availability. Unless a traveler like Bell had a chance to purchase one before leaving home, he was not likely to fi nd a retail outlet hawking pocket diaries along the Overland Trail.9 Although one might think Susan Brown’s 1843 Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum more rural by the mere presence of the word Almanac in its title, her pocket book was as urban and industrial as Bell’s metropolitan cousin. It was designed to accustom the user to the ways of the city. Lowell was large and impersonal, a place where you’d need a directory to fi nd your way around. Even Brown acknowledged at one point in her diary her distress over feeling “Alone & among strangers.” So publishers added an extensive Business Key to help a newcomer like Brown negotiate the foreign streets.10 Aside from the directory, the diary pages inside Brown’s Pocket Memorandum were geared toward uses most associated with city living: managing one’s time and money. The directive at the top of each diary page that told customers the spaces below were for “Appointments, Bills due, Notes due, and occasional Mem” signaled what kind of notes were most critical in the eyes of the publisher. “Appointments” came fi rst, suggesting that Lowell was a bustling place and one needed a diary to organize such commitments and remain punctual. Next came “Bills” and “Notes”

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Figure 3.2. Susan Brown, only eighteen years old, arrived in Lowell in January 1843 to work as a weaver in the Middlesex Mills. Lithograph (ca. 1850) courtesy of University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Lowell History.

that meant a wage earner like Brown needed a manual to track her expenses. “Mem”oranda was last and underscored that the diary was more about managing one’s time and money than intended for a more personal form of self-expression. The Lowell Almanac could have been read as an attempt by publishers to control the working individual. After all, it fit right into the regime of disciplinary tactics mill owners deployed, including boardinghouses and their regulations, factory bells, and extended workdays, to keep female workers like Brown in step.11 Nevertheless, Brown did not see her Lowell Almanac in that way. In the nine months she spent in the mills, Brown exhibited a deep aversion to Lowell and its ways, but she never turned on her diary. Maybe because of the product’s strong links to its almanac past and its adaptability, Brown and her cohort were no longer resistant to a prefabricated design that imposed its order each and every day. Indeed, many Americans seemed to welcome it. Although its regimented format could be

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constraining, it allowed for the expansion of a cultural habit and enabled more Americans than ever to appreciate how satisfying it could be to record their lives on paper. At least a generation beyond the American Revolution, such customers saw their world, and their diaries, differently. Their diaries shaped their daily experience and allowed them to assign meaning to the singular moments of their lives. It told them that their “events” were worth recording. Many folks, without the competency, time, or inclination, chose a pocket diary because it looked familiar, a lot like the almanac sitting on papa’s desk at home. It wasn’t intimidating. It asked for very little. For those reasons among others, they allowed the pocket diary—a manufactured item of individual self-expression—to shape their life records. Although they did not produce the kind of diary we might label as a literary endeavor, such date books encouraged a writing revolution, introducing a new generation of Americans to a daily habit they might otherwise have missed. It took time but, long after Aitken fi rst pitched his Register to a reluctant clientele, the American public set about making the commercial diary personal. In an era seduced by the promises of self-culture, some saw the diary as a path to a newly democratic world of possibilities. *

*

*

Before customers like Brown could make a store-bought diary their own, a group of entrepreneurs had to update Aitken’s original. It took decades and a few missteps, but these businessmen, building on Aitken’s model, delivered a product that better suited its new audience and turned diary resisters into devotees. While some printers pursued fame and glamour as literary publishers, a new generation of bookmen who would soon label themselves “blank book manufacturers” chose a less glitzy, yet arguably more lucrative, road. In an 1844 list of Boston taxpayers, only two individuals in the book trades ranked in the highest bracket with $100,000 or more in taxable wealth: one was an editor, the other a blank book manufacturer.12 In the hands of such ambitious men, the pocket diary, though born of necessity in a commercial age that demanded better accounting of one’s fi nances, became a more universal tool “for the Purpose of Registering Events of Past, Present or Future Occurrence.”13 Stationers like John Marsh of Boston stripped the oncedeluxe diaries of their extraneous matter, kept the essentials such as cal-

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endars and weights and measures, and made them more adaptable. They invited all Americans to make the blank pages their own and, in the process, created a mass market for this workaday diary. Marsh and his contemporaries had uncovered a publishing niche that weathered economic downturns and renewed itself each year. Everyone, according to Marsh’s advertisements, needed a diary come the New Year. Blank book manufacturers understood that they did not have to offer much in the way of reference matter to sell their printed diaries. The diary itself, rather than the statistics, became the main attraction. Not until entrepreneurs moved the diary center stage did the product really take off. They stripped them of census data, lists of government officials, essays, or poetry and left a streamlined version more focused on the pursuit of diary keeping. Unconsciously or not, publishers turned the product inward, foregrounding one’s own data over outside knowledge. At the same time, they retained critical links to the past, preserving the word “almanac” in their titles and features such as the times of sunrise and sunset, postal rates, and interest tables that masked the item’s novelty. The diary this generation of entrepreneurs settled on was more of a departure from the past than customers realized. Nevertheless, it took time for these businessmen to settle on a winning formula. In the decades before Susan Brown arrived in Lowell, the book trades in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia saw great changes. It was a world Aitken and his contemporaries would not have recognized. No longer were books printed and bound by hand in small artisan shops.14 Just as it had for textiles, the machine transformed the book business and created an entirely new industry. The entrepreneurs called themselves blank book manufacturers. By reputation, they fell somewhere between a lowly job printer and a literary publisher. But their middling status was no reflection of their income, which could rival some of the top publishers of the era. It’s easy to chart the transformation in the industry’s trade cards and advertising posters. Previously they referred to themselves as bookshops or stationery stores that became by the 1830s and ’40s multistoried establishments known as a “Stationery Warehouse” or “Blank Book Manufactory.”15 Benefiting from a host of technologies including the steam press, stereotyping, and new papermaking devices, they churned out dozens of products to see what might stick. According to a recent study of Boston’s book business, in 1832 “apart from dry goods, the book trades were the most dynamic producer of mass-market-oriented consumer items.”

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Boston printer S. N. Dickinson had experienced that boom fi rsthand and seemed continually amazed by the growth in his business. Underneath a “View of one Section of Dickinson’s Printing Office” displayed inside a Boston Almanac for 1842, Dickinson marveled that he began his business “Ten or twelve years ago” in one small room but “Since then we have added room after room, as our business required, till we have spread . . . over five stories on Washington street.” In a similar vein, a New York stationery fi rm named Francis and Loutrel circulated a nineby six-inch, dark blue handbill that eagerly boasted that “Our Factory, complete with New Machinery and fi rst class workmen, enables us to furnish, at short notice, any style of Blank Book.” Among those blank books were “Diaries and Daily Journals” for the new year.16 Thanks in part to the industrialization of the colonial print shop, the daily planner had become big business. But it did not happen overnight. In the early days of the nineteenth century, there were many diaries to choose from: the Massachusetts Register; the Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer; the Ladies’ Pocket Book; Marsh’s Pocket Diary, or Daily Remembrancer; Brown’s Almanack, Pocket Memorandum and Account Book; Clayton’s Octavo Diary; Stewart’s Register; Antice’s Vest Pocket and Ladies’ Reticule Diary; Le Souvenir or Picturesque Pocket Diary; or The Memento, or Lady and Gentleman’s Diary. They all shared a few essential characteristics: they were published annually, offered a separate space for diary entries, and included calendars and other data once the exclusive meat of almanacs. Such variety masked the great instability in the market. Diaries came and went. Some lasted only a year or two before disappearing into history. No one format would dominate until after the Civil War. Nevertheless, if successful, any one of those diary titles might guarantee its publisher a steady seller from year to year.17 This dizzying array of diary choices underscores the key themes of expansion and experimentation in antebellum American publishing. Printers churned out books and ephemera in search of that one thing that would bring the public into their shops. But it was not without its risks. A high turnover rate meant some fi rms lasted only a few years before shutting their doors. The decade of the 1837 Panic was especially sluggish, though business rebounded in the 1840s.18 Although it was no longer the center of political power, Philadelphia remained a focal point of publishing innovation in the days of the early Republic, and its publishers continually introduced formats other en-

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trepreneurs might adopt and improve upon. Aitken’s legacy lived on in these small volumes that, like his Register, paired statistical trivia with a memoranda book for diary keeping. Two of the most popular titles, the Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer and the American Ladies Pocket Book, were published by the same man, William Young Birch, beginning in 1796. Ten years after their introduction, Birch was selling dozens of the diaries wholesale to publishers in New York and Boston.19 The small diary venture had turned lucrative for Birch and for John Bioren, who printed them on his behalf. When Birch left the business in 1815, Bioren might have thought he would inherit the valuable diary title. Instead, Birch left it to Abraham Small, Bioren’s competitor. Undeterred and unwilling to give up the promise of annual diary profits, Bioren put out his own pocket book that he aptly named Bioren’s Pennsylvania Pocket Remembrancer. But it was Small’s title, the original Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer, that had the broader appeal and reached markets as far away as Boston.20 It was the Pocket Remembrancer, you may recall, that was a favorite of Boston Brahmin John Quincy Adams. Two weeks before Christmas 1816, Boston publishers West and Richardson announced that they had “Just received from Philadelphia” a shipment of the Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer and its female cousin the Lady’s Pocket Book for 1817. They were “elegantly bound, in the form of a pocket book, in morocco” and could be had for $1.25 each at their shop in Cornhill. 21 Of forty master printers in business in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century, only ten made the transition from printer to publisher, among them diary producers John Bioren and Abraham Small.22 Back in Boston, many bookmen were looking for their own niche. Aitken and his counterparts wore many hats and could be bookseller, bookbinder, stationer, and publisher all at once. With the growth of the book trades came increased specialization. Tasks that at one time were completed in one shop by one or two men formed the beginnings of a new branch of the industry. One could choose from among nearly a dozen specialties listed in city’s directories, including bookbinder, bookseller, engraver, stereotyper, stationer, printer, publisher, and editor. 23 With the fi nancial stakes of literary publishing so high, some preferred forms of print that guaranteed a wider appeal and announced their new ventures in the pages of the local paper. Elisha Bellamy tried out a “new printing office” at “Room No. 10, State street,” where he executed book and job printing with “neatness and despatch.” John Pratt formed a partnership

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with Nathan Sawyer and opened a “book binding manufactory” opposite the Exchange Coffee House in Congress Street, offering up backgammon tables, chessboards, and other stationery items. After apprenticing eight years with a book binder, John Roberts struck out on his own in 1821 with a “New Book Store” selling “Blank Books and Stationary [sic],” relegating book binding to a back room. 24 These operations moved toward industrialization and wage labor sooner than their counterparts in other trades. By 1832, the average shop in the book trades employed almost nine men, more than a typical Boston fi rm a decade later. And these shops were just as likely to hire boys and women as adult men, an indication that the work was primarily unskilled. 25 Coupling those factors with technological advances such as the steam press and stereotype machines meant that the book trades were well positioned to exploit a new mass market for consumer goods. By the 1830s dozens of men had abandoned other occupations, such as hardware or dry goods, to make their fortune in Boston’s growing book industry. 26 Even in the wake of the Panic of 1837, many fi rms engaged in blank book making continued to peddle their printed wares. Three competing blank book outfitters took out ads in the fi rst issue of the Columbian Centinel for 1838, hoping to catch the eye of customers before they chose their account books for the new year. At Stationer’s Hall in State Street, Thomas Groom promised “A Fresh and complete assortment of Account Books . . . made of the best paper, and bound in the strongest and most substantial style.” Benjamin Loring, who called himself a stationer and blank book manufacturer, reminded readers that they would be remiss if they had not yet picked up their “Account Books for the New Year.” S. G. Simpkins enumerated the variety of “New Account Books for the New Year” one could have at his little store at the corner of Court and Brattle Streets, including “Legers, Journals . . . [and] Memoranda Books.” The phrases “blank books” or “account books” played very prominently in the text of all of these advertisements.27 To these innovators the daily diary was a blank book. That is, even though it contained printed matter, a title page, or preruled memoranda pages, they considered it blank until the diarist made it her own with her pen. Compare that to how job printers used the term “blanks”—for decades their bread and butter—to refer to legal or other official forms: the page was not blank in a literal sense but rather provided a printed template for the user, a guide or built-in instruction manual.28 Blank diaries did the same. Diary producers made a myriad of assumptions about how

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buyers would use them: how often they might record, how long or short their entries, or how detailed they kept their cash accounts. Whether diarists chose to follow those guidelines was less of a concern. Unless, of course, it meant they could improve the design and increase sales by making it more appealing to more people. Perhaps offer a variety of diary formats or sizes to suit different recording styles or design a form malleable enough to answer multiple needs. Commercial diaries in the early nineteenth century mirrored the format Robert Aitken pioneered, at least initially. For instance, Boston’s West and Richardson paired memoranda pages with a reference manual in their Massachusetts Register, published annually from 1801 to 1847 when it was succeeded by the Massachusetts State Record and Year Book of General Information. The draw was the reference matter, not the diary spaces. The diary appeared almost as afterthought, an add-on that might sell more Registers. Others that fit this category of referencecum-diary were the Boston Almanac; the Worcester Almanac, Directory and Business Advertiser; the Merchant’s Memorandum Book, and Pocket Almanac; and Sword’s Pocket Almanack, Churchman’s Calendar, and Ecclesiastical Register. Hardbound and extensive in its statistics, each was more register and local directory than diary. Copyrighted in 1836 by Samuel N. Dickinson, the printer who bragged about adding room after room to his growing business, the Boston Almanac offered customers only a page a month for personal notes. 29 Understanding how and when the commercial diary became big business might be easier to grasp by examining the case of one man and his book career in Boston. John Marsh actually started out in hardware. In 1823, he opened a small hardware shop at 92 Newbury Street. It was adjacent to his brother Bela’s stationery store and bookbindery, perhaps the reason why Marsh had to choose another pursuit apart from books. But John’s business was short-lived, closing just two years later. With few other prospects, John went to work for his brother and learned the art of bookbinding fi rsthand. It didn’t take long, however, before he struck out on his own. By 1826, the younger Marsh had established himself on State Street, one of the premiere avenues of the early Boston book trades and, only a few steps from Merchants Row, well situated for the commercial trade. 30 Above its entrance he erected a sign depicting a blank ledger and called it the “Stationer’s warehouse.” Like any new business in that period, Marsh enlisted the power of print to advertise his grand opening. Picture a young boy stuffi ng a small handbill into the palms of pedestri-

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ans, mostly businessmen, bustling by Marsh’s shop. Plain and unfussy without illustration, the five- by six-inch poster got straight to the point: John Marsh was now a “stationer and manufacturer” and had on hand “Stationary [sic] Articles, Account, Nautical & School Books, Commercial Blanks, Writing Ink [and] Fine Cutlery.” There was no mention whatsoever of diaries, at least initially. Marsh also paid for a nearly full-page ad in the advertising supplement to the 1826 Boston Directory where he claimed to be, in addition to a stationer, a blank book manufacturer who “having served several years at manufacturing Account Books, [and] having an extensive bookbindery above his store” was ready to supply his retail and wholesale customers with blank books to order. Marsh littered the columns of the local papers with lengthy price lists, noting that he carried a great variety of “Pocket and Memorandum Books” among other items. 31 Still, no specific mention of diaries. Like so many of his contemporaries, Marsh started out offering a product that was more directory than diary, akin to the reference manuals and pocket memoranda that followed closely in Aitken’s footsteps. Marsh called his the Merchant’s Memorandum and Price Book of 1827. Like West and Richardson’s Massachusetts Register, Marsh’s book was a reference manual fi rst, “designed as a key to the almost endless variety of Merchandize required for the country trade.” In addition to the merchandise list, Marsh offered blank memoranda pages where owners could insert the quantity of items needed and their cost, transforming the price book into commercial aide-mémoire. 32 But that was the only year of its publication. Maybe Marsh did not sell enough to make it worthwhile. In the next few years, Marsh experimented with different kinds of publications, hoping to fi nd something that would help him make his mark. There was little initially that would have set Marsh apart from his brethren. Also in 1827, Marsh published an English grammar book and a sermon delivered by Jeroboam Parker celebrating the centennial of Southborough, Massachusetts, not an unusual move for an entrepreneur in an era one scholar has dubbed “the golden age of local publishing.”33 By 1829, Marsh was still looking for a hook, something to distinguish himself from other stationers and blank book manufacturers in town. He found it, at least temporarily, in Freemasonry. Marsh hoped to capitalize on the public’s growing mistrust of the secret societies known generally as Masons. Marsh began publishing anti-Masonic tracts and renamed his shop, in some advertisements, the “Anti-Masonic Bookstore.”

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He rode the wave for several years and, beginning in 1830, published none other than an almanac catering to anti-Masonic readers. 34 Marsh’s strategy was similar to that of other publishers who spent some time during their career putting out an almanac all their own. It still made fi nancial sense to rely on almanac sales in the 1820s and ’30s even though almanacs no longer enjoyed the universal readership of the colonial era. The annual remained popular as a calendar and reference guide, especially in the countryside. Depending on the subject matter, however, the audience for such customized almanacs as Marsh’s New England Anti-Masonic Almanac could be quite limited. But it offered other benefits, aside from profits. Still little more than a paper pamphlet, an almanac served as a good primer for printers with publishing aspirations. They could learn the fundamentals of publishing with little risk and earn a few pennies profit besides. In addition to publishing their Massachusetts Register every year, West and Richardson also put out Robert B. Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanack. 35 Another entrepreneur, who would become one of Boston’s top stationers into the twentieth century, Thomas Groom, began his career publishing almanacs. 36 But the anti-Masonic frenzy would soon pass, and Marsh’s almanac went along with it. Marsh published his last New England Anti-Masonic Almanac in 1835. That left him, once again, in search of a steady seller. Marsh did not have to look far for an answer. About a seventy-mile ride up the New Hampshire turnpike from Boston, John F. Brown, no relation to Susan or the antislavery martyr of the same name, had established a successful publishing outpost in Concord called the Franklin Bookstore. Part of Brown’s success as a small proprietor and regional publisher lay in the introduction in 1838 of Brown’s Almanack, Pocket Memorandum, and Account Book. Similar in format to Susan Brown’s Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum, it was less an almanac than a record-keeping manual. But even Brown understood the difficulty his customers might have distinguishing it from a standard almanac, for only a year later he added the word “improved” to its title. Brown eventually came to refer to it instead in store advertisements as Brown’s Pocket Memorandum. 37 Brown cordoned off more than fi fty pages of the small pocket-sized volume for record keeping, organized in weekly installments as it was in the Lowell Almanac under the heading “Appointments, Bills due, Notes due, and occasional Mem.” Although Brown continued to commission a farmer’s almanac from Dudley Leavitt each year, it was his new publication that became a regional best seller.

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In a distribution scheme that allowed fellow booksellers across New England to paste their own imprint on the colored paper covers, Brown reached far beyond his local market. By 1848, this strategy had paid off, increasing his circulation to more than 40,000 copies and requiring the printing of a second edition that year. 38 It was in 1848, perhaps not coincidentally, that Marsh decided to offer a diary all his own. Although Brown’s Pocket Memorandum was the inspiration, Marsh perfected the format and created something new. Measuring about three by five inches with a cover of pressed pasteboard, it was more utilitarian in appearance than Aitken’s deluxe Register or the pretty pocket remembrancers that publishers like Bioren brought out in Aitken’s wake. 39 Marsh put his own name on its title page, calling it Marsh’s New Diary, or Daily Remembrancer, for 1848. Inside, Marsh offered customers less printed matter than Aitken, Bioren, or even Brown would have dared. There were no essays, political portraits, or poems. Even the statistical or reference material was reduced to a minimum, consisting of a list of the executive and cabinet secretaries, tables for interest rates and postage, and three pages devoted to various weights and measures. The almanac matter was whittled down to a list of the year’s eclipses and six calendar pages detailing the moon’s phases, the times of sunrise and sunset, along with high tides. It was the diary, not the reference matter, that dominated this half-inch-thick pocket book. At three days per page, Marsh gave customers more space than ever before for their daily entries. What’s more, Marsh added separate sections at the back of the book, one for the recording of cash accounts and the other for “Notes and Bills Payable.” The weekly memoranda pages in Brown’s Almanack were supposed to accommodate all entries, fi nancial and otherwise. Under the ubiquitous heading “Appointments, Bills due, Notes due, and occasional Mem,” “Mem” came last. Not so in Marsh’s reorganization. By removing one’s money matters to the back, Marsh suggested that the diary spaces could now serve a different purpose. Marsh hinted what he had in mind by explaining on his title page that the diary contained “A Blank for Every Day in the Year, for the Record of Interesting Events, Appointments, &c.”40 That prompted customers to fi ll in the Marsh’s blanks with the daily trivia of their lives: work, church, a little leisure, visits with friends, family milestones, and other topics. After years of never mentioning the word “diary” in his marketing pitch to customers, Marsh announced his new product wherever he could. To generate sales, he advertised heavily in the Boston Annual Ad-

Figure 3.3. Although not obvious from this title page, John Marsh offered his customers a stripped-down pocket diary, featuring a calendar, interest tables, and only the most essential reference matter. Author’s collection.

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vertiser, in local newspapers, and in the pages of his own publications. By the late 1840s, Marsh had moved into larger quarters along Washington Street, the heart of the city’s business district and centrally located across the street from the Post Office and City Hall. But with so many of his competitors clustered alongside him in the few blocks along Washington and nearby State Street, Marsh could not rely on walk-in traffic alone.41 Although his advertisements continued to emphasize a variety of goods such as “Fine French and English Stationery” as well as a more mundane selection of Bibles and schoolbooks, Marsh could now capitalize on his new publication. As proprietor of his “Paper and Stationery Warehouse,” Marsh boasted that he was now the manufacturer of “Account Books, Writing and Dressing Cases, Manifold Letter Writers, [and] Blank Diaries.” Another ad mentioned that “Marsh’s Blank Diaries” were available in “four different sizes,” depending on one’s personal preference.42 Diaries had become a mainstay of Marsh’s business, as they had for many others. To witness how much had changed in the way these books were produced one had only to peek inside a production factory like that of the Harper Establishment of New York. Distributed across no fewer than seven stories, Harper’s factory, opened in 1855, utilized the era’s state-ofthe-art printing technology. Production began on the fi rst floor with the basement reserved for the boiler room and the delivery of raw materials. Replacing the journeyman printers of yesterday, women, supervised by a male foreman, fed paper into no fewer than twenty steam presses. Boys then took the sheets to the next floor up to hang for drying. On the third floor, men and women worked in concert with the men flattening the sheets with hydraulic machines and young women tasked with folding the paper. More hydraulic presses could be found on the floor above for sharpening the folds, with women again enlisted to sew and stitch sheets. Next, workers fi nished the job, fitting covers, pasting flyleaves, and trimming edges. The top floor was reserved for the most respected men in the building: the compositors and electrotypists responsible for typesetting the pages. Techniques such as electrotyping, successor to stereotyping, saved printers from having to manually set and reuse type. Instead, once a page was designed, it was fi xed as a metal plate and could be used time and again in a more efficient and economical approach to printing.43 While Marsh’s operation was not as elaborate, it mirrored Harper’s in the division of labor and reliance on machines. In its latest incarnation, the daily planner was cheap, utilitarian, and

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more universal. Thanks to technology like that found in Harper’s building above and to pared-down content that cut out extra fees paid to compilers, stationers began to charge a fraction of what they once did. No longer the pricey accoutrement or genteel accessory of the successful merchant or cosmopolitan lady of leisure. Back in the second decade of the 1800s, West and Richardson commanded as much as $1.25 per diary for a Gentlemen’s or Ladies’ pocket remembrancer bound in morocco. Even their own Massachusetts Register cost as much as 75 cents unbound.44 By 1855, Jotham Bigelow, a tinware peddler and candle maker, could walk into Nathaniel Cate’s bookstore in Springfield and pick up a Pocket Diary for 1855 for 38 cents. In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, carpenter Peter Forney could not have paid much more, for he bought his Daily Pocket Diary for the Year 1858 at none other than “John M. Good’s Cheap Book Store Adjoining Brew’s Hotel.”45 Although Susan Brown did not record the cost of her Lowell Almanac, Business Key, and Pocket Memorandum, for 1843, she did list how much she spent a few years later for a similar version: 36 cents. That amounted to nearly a third of her weekly wages. Hardly a princely sum but a good deal more than the “8 cts” she used toward “needles & linen” to knit a pair of fi ngerless mittens. Marsh never mentioned pricing in his advertisements, but his diaries remained within reach for working-class men and women.46 With a publishing workplace like Harper’s newly open to women, it figured that ladies also began to appear on the other side of the bookshop counter—as customers. That’s not to say that Aitken had no women customers, though many remained invisible since they often transacted business with the aid of intermediaries like husbands or fathers. Across the street from the rowdy London Coffee House and merchant’s exchange and just steps from the wharves, Aitken’s store drew in few women for browsing or book buying.47 Bookstores remained a male domain, at least in the cities, into the early nineteenth century. Early trade cards and broadsides, when booksellers or stationers used them, portrayed a scholarly tableaux of books stacked on a shelf or inkwells, quills, and a scroll of paper: a masculine display with an appeal to the learned.48 What distinguished Marsh’s generation of bookmen were the strategies they employed to welcome women into the fold. Realizing how instrumental women were in creating a mass market for their paper goods, proprietors went to great lengths to make the bookshop and its wares more inclusive. By the 1820s, more detailed pictorials began to appear on billheads, book labels, and trade cards. Most likely the consequence of

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stereotype engravings, these illustrations offered a glimpse of the bookshop itself. More often than not, women played a prominent role in these inviting portraits. On the back wrapper of his Pocket Memorandum, for instance, John F. Brown printed a full-page advertisement with a halfpage display of his Concord bookshop known as “The Franklin Bookstore.” On the sidewalk out front—amid a handful of passersby—are piles of boxes stacked and ready to be shipped to customers in Boston and New York, just one sign that his was a going concern. Perhaps another indication of its success, a woman, on the arm of her companion, walks by the large glass windows and into the shop.49 Likewise, a stylish woman sporting a fancy feather bonnet stands in front of Cushing and Sons’ “Town and Country Book and Stationary [sic] Store” in Baltimore on top of an invoice dated October 21, 1829. 50 William Maurice’s blank book and stationery shop in Philadelphia came to be called “The Ladies’ favorite Store” because, according to one newspaper, “the ladies all buy their stationery of Maurice, he is such a pleasant little fellow: it is a fortunate thing for him that he is married.”51 By the mid-nineteenth century, women—on both sides of the bookshop counter—had become an integral part of the diary and stationery trade. John Marsh never wrote an autobiography, but if he had it might sound like that of William Maurice’s, a contemporary in the blank book business in Philadelphia. In 1847, Maurice published a promotional pamphlet titled Small Profi ts and Quick Sales, his publishing mantra. Full of newspaper excerpts and testimonials, the twenty-two-page advertising circular portrayed Maurice as a self-made entrepreneur. Arriving in Philadelphia a supposedly “poor, friendless, fatherless boy, with nothing to cheer him on or cast a gleam of sunshine across his rugged pathway but the blessing of a widowed mother,” Maurice acquired a “subordinate situation” in the publishing house of Hogan and Thompson. Sixteen years after leaving the house “to row his own boat,” Maurice, whose own business “by rapid degrees, grew up, up, UP,” returned to buy out the entire inventory of his former employer and moved—as one newspaper put it—from a “parlor to a palace.” Maurice, a “walking, talking, prosperous and prospering illustration of what can be accomplished by a properly directed spirit of enterprise,” managed this commercial feat “by strict economy, close attention to business, scrupulous honesty and liberal advertising in the newspapers of the day.” What is easy to miss in all of this verbal backslapping is that Maurice—like Marsh—built his publishing empire on a foundation of blank books. The Daily Sun wrote of Mau-

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rice’s books: “They vary in size and importance from the common size memorandum book to the portly Ledger, and in regard to the quality of paper, the accuracy of the ruling, and the substantial and elegant binding, have never been surpassed in this country. The set of books which he has on exhibition . . . may well be pointed to as an evidence of American taste and skill.” Whether the reader believed the hype or not, Maurice evidently did, for he admitted that he “would like some day to be a rich man.”52 And Maurice believed that the blank book could get him there. Like Maurice, Marsh sought to build a fortune on his outlay of blank books. But he could not do it by relying on business customers alone. Although the daily planner was originally designed for men, Marsh and his cohort convinced women that the product was just as critical for them. Their title pages affi rmed their strategy. Stationer Samuel Stewart of Philadelphia called his pocket diary a “Daily Register for the use of Private Families and Persons of Business.”53 When painter John Bachelder lost his diary in the spring of 1859, he picked up a new one generically named “The People’s Pocket Diary” at a stationer’s shop in Salem, Massachusetts. For her diary of 1856, Madilia Scofield, the wife of a California customs agent, chose a New York imprint “for the Use of Merchants, Manufacturers, Mechanics, Housekeepers, and Professional Men.”54 Even though Marsh never employed such inclusive phrases on his title page, he managed to attract a diverse crowd to his humble product: clerks, maids, miners, ministers, housewives, and even a renowned transcendentalist. In truth, Boston socialite Sarah Watson Dana may not have chosen Marsh’s Pocket Diary for 1851 but appeared to claim it for her own when her husband, author Richard Henry, cast it aside. Other Bostonians who, although they had the means to keep their records in much fancier volumes, chose a Marsh planner instead included future Boston mayor Samuel C. Cobb, minister to “all the poor of Boston” Andrew Bigelow, well-to-do widow Sarah Edes, and Harvard student Stephen Salisbury. 55 Even Ralph Waldo Emerson was a fan. Among the thirty-one pocket diaries in Emerson’s collection of journals, at least two for 1855 and 1856 were manufactured by Marsh. Still, Marsh couldn’t hope to accumulate such “small profits” into big dividends unless his books also made their way into the pockets of more modest clients. In the spring of 1850, Russell Tubbs of Hancock, New Hampshire, carried Marsh’s Pocket Diary to the gold fields of California, where he kept a detailed record of his attempts to get rich. In spite of her daily responsibilities to wealthy New England industrialists the Lowells, servant Lorenza

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Berbineau found time to keep a daily record in her 1851 Marsh diary, the same brand preferred by her employer Mary Gardner Lowell. On the fi rst page of Marsh’s New Diary, or Daily Remembrancer for 1853, railroad clerk Israel Lombard remarked what “A Stormy disagreeable day” it was on that particular New Year’s. Marsh customer John Studley of Worcester, Massachusetts, was a carpenter before enlisting in the Union Army in 1861. 56 This diverse list of satisfied customers was a testament to the daily planner’s versatility and ubiquity in mid-nineteenth-century America. *

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Susan Brown, just as diary retailers such as Marsh hoped, may have been given her Lowell Pocket Memorandum as a Christmas or New Year’s gift at the turn of 1843. It seemed an appropriate farewell gesture from her friends and family as she embarked on a new course in Lowell. Although publishers like Marsh worked hard to update the daily planner, there was much more to the era’s diary explosion than a technologyfueled blank book business. Men like Marsh could not have succeeded in carving out a market for their commercial diaries without a change of heart among customers whose forebears more than a half-century earlier had rejected Aitken’s original. For Susan Brown, a new life warranted a new diary. Two years earlier, she had kept a diary as a student at Pittsfield Academy. It was a homemade pamphlet: a few sheets folded and fastened together with steel pins with a plain brown cover upon which Brown wrote “Diary of past c/1841–2.” Brown recorded with some regularity but had little to say beyond “At school.” That would change after she arrived in Lowell when she expected so much more of her readymade Pocket Memorandum. In it, Brown did things she could never have done in her makeshift booklet. Her daily planner served initially as an account book to track her meager wages, but it soon played multiple roles. It helped her count the weeks since she’d left home. It reluctantly accustomed her to clock time by providing space to record the times she went in and out of the mill. While fulfi lling these more specialized uses, her datebook had space left over for entries she might have recorded in a lengthier journal if only she had the time. It allowed her to vent her loathing of industrial work, as when she wrote on May 20, 1843: “Still immured within the massy brick walls of a hateful factory.” Finally, it played witness to her

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efforts toward self-improvement, giving her room to record her attendance at temperance lectures and the like. 57 Brown’s pocket book was instrumental and incidental at the same time. It was instrumental for Brown and customers like her who needed an accounting assistant and portable calendar. However, it also was incidental in the way it fostered more personal thoughts and reflections unintended by either the producer or customer. More than likely, Brown pulled out her diary each day to record an expense and, after a brief pause, added a remark or observation unrelated to money or even work. That is how someone like Brown became an accidental diarist. The minutiae of every day coupled with the occasional reflection eventually added up. But that still does not sufficiently explain the growing appeal for the daily planner in the mid-nineteenth century. Not every customer was like Brown whose new circumstances demanded a different kind of diary. Even if other customers weren’t headed to work in Lowell, most turned to the commercial diary for similar reasons, at least initially. They, like Brown, were caught in a widening web of economic exchanges that required more regimented accounting tools. Different in size and scope from the commercial expansion of the eighteenth century and marked by periodic booms and busts, the market economy of antebellum America ushered in an era of great opportunity, but not without a heavy dose of anxiety. As Asa Greene put it in The Perils of Pearl Street in 1834, America’s “wheel of fortune” was “constantly moving; some are making, and some are braking.”58 In this volatile fi nancial climate, accounting instruction and pocket diary sales flourished. It’s no wonder that a New York publishing fi rm named Kiggins and Kellogg chose to emphasize a new section in a broadside touting its array of “Diaries for 1855”: “One peculiar feature possessed by our Diaries, which will, we think, be a strong recommendation to the user, is their having twelve pages devoted to ‘Cash Account.’”59 In this sense, there was great continuity with the past since many of Aitken’s customers considered his Register little more than a portable account book. However, much had changed since Aitken’s day. Although money concerns remained a constant, more customers than ever were eager to account for themselves. This was, after all, what Emerson coined the “age of the fi rst-person singular.”60 Alexis de Tocqueville linked this self-interested turn to the rise of democratic politics. He wrote: “In democratic societies each citizen is habitually occupied in contemplat-

Figure 3.4. New York diary manufacturers Kiggins and Kellogg advertised a new section for recording a “Cash Account” in its “Diaries for 1855.” Broadside courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

ing a very small object, which is himself.” Thus individualism, if left unchecked, encouraged man to turn “all his sentiments toward himself alone.”61 Apart from politics, there were whiffs of individualism in the major religious, social, economic, and cultural movements of the day. Evangelicalism cast religious conversion as an individual’s self-centered pursuit of communion with God. Capitalism privileged an individual’s

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striving over communal work. To guard against the dangers of the leveling of society, etiquette manuals focused primarily on an individual’s own deportment and manners. Sentimental fiction, not to mention a new brand of autobiography that focused on the trials of unlikely protagonists such as criminals, beggars, and slaves, foregrounded the struggles of the individual and everyday experience.62 By the time Marsh introduced his fi rst diary, individualism was in the air. Just consider this New Year’s address published by Boston’s Columbian Centinel in its fi rst issue for 1838: How brief then is a year. . . . How small is the present population of this Globe, compared to the myriads that have preceded and will follow us! . . . However inconsiderable, therefore, the tenants of the earth at any one time may be, compared to all the living beings in the universe, through all time, it is nevertheless true that every individual is a microcosm, or a sort of little world to himself. . . . Short, therefore, and precarious as life may be, every human being is involved in circumstances of the utmost importance to himself. We are all, therefore, in the habit of considering the events of a year of great moment.63

It almost reads like a diary advertisement: “This is why you, too, should keep a diary.” What better way to memorialize those “circumstances [in a given year] of the utmost importance to himself.” In his inaugural diary entry in 1852, Abraham Firth, a postmaster in Clappville, Massachusetts, intended to do just that in the preprinted pages of his Clayton’s Quarto Diary. Firth had wanted to keep a diary before then but hesitated because he thought the facts, which referred “pretty exclusively to the ‘I’ who wrote them down,” made them “hardly worth preserving.” Yet upon “further reflection,” he reconsidered and realized that “the events in which a man is most interested and a part of which he may be, depended upon the individual himself.” In other words, there is absolutely nothing wrong with noting the “petty schemes for his own advancement and to promote his own interests.” Firth concluded: “if his diary be a true record, what else can it contain?” This attitude was markedly different from that of Mehetable Amory’s forty years earlier who worried that diary keeping might produce “a stronger propencity to self-love.”64 It was now permissible for Firth to focus on the “I” that Amory so mistrusted. In a similar vein, Mandana Greenwood felt no need to apologize for using the 1857 diary her husband gave her as a “free and truthful transcript

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of what strikes my thought.”65 Marsh’s Pocket Diary and others became vehicles of self-expression. When a man like Abraham Firth walked into a bookshop and chose his diary from the preprinted selection, he exercised a personal preference, took his choice home, and transformed the purchase into a reflection of himself. That diary embodied all the characteristics of the age—in miniature. It was democratic, commercialized, educational, and self-centered. Yet it was more than a new self-centeredness that drove diary sales. What set this era apart from Aitken’s, other than a more extensive and literate clientele (a by-product of the market economy and greater educational opportunities especially for women), was an updated cultural imperative to “redeem the time” in a pervasive drive for self-improvement. More secular than spiritual, the renewed emphasis on self-improvement, a directive dating to the country’s Puritan founders, was closely tied to an aspiring class of middle Americans pursuing any angle to get ahead. Apart from being commercial diary fans, these also were the customers likely responsible for turning Benjamin Franklin’s early American parable about the twin values of time and money, later dubbed The Way to Wealth, into a nineteenth-century publishing sensation. Reprinted no fewer than forty-three times after 1800 and included in many versions of Noah Webster’s schoolbooks, the once-pseudonymous preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac had become the motto of a new generation, one that took to heart the lessons of Father Abraham: “If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be,” as Poor Richard says, “the greatest prodigality!” since, as he elsewhere tells us, “Lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough.” Let us, then, up and be doing, and doing to the purpose . . . “and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”66

Such advice helps put into context a note left by eight-year-old William Hoppin, of Providence, Rhode Island, at the back of a family account book in January 1821: “I got up late did not get breakfast before half past 8 oclock which I think was very wrong for whilst I was laying a bed I might have learnt considerable for we have not a minute to loose.” Hoppin had commandeered twenty-nine leaves in the “Bank Book” of the family’s auctioneering fi rm to fulfi ll a pledge “at the request of his Father” to keep a diary. While Hoppin’s father preferred his son use whatever “book” was handy, others purchased commercial dia-

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ries expressly for the purpose of keeping account of their time as well as their money. Amos Lawrence was at Andover in 1827 when his father gave him his fi rst pocket diary. Lawrence was only thirteen, which may explain why his attempts at balancing his expenses proved so difficult. In frustration, the young student tore out several pages of his diary and made it impossible for his father to review his accounts. Disappointed and “dissatisfied,” the elder Lawrence upbraided his son in the pages of the diary he gave him. After recounting Lawrence’s fi nancial transgression, his father “enjoin[ed] it upon him never to do the like again, but to keep his account carefully and account to me for what money he receives. The habit of accounting is a good habit & Master Amos I must insist on you doing it; Therefore present me your book, and a true account as far as practicable.”67 Time, money, and self-improvement were a potent combination and drove many Americans to their pens on a daily basis, whether at school, at work, or at home. But such motives, the more familiar time and money cloaked in a veil of self-improvement, were often difficult to disentangle and operated differently for sundry diarists. For the young Amos Lawrence, money seemed uppermost in his father’s thoughts, whereas Hoppin’s father appeared more interested in his son’s proper use of time. Nevertheless, both approaches had an underlying aim of instilling a good “habit,” a hallmark of any self-improvement project. Updating the lessons of Lord Chesterfield, conduct writers recommended diary keeping to serve those ends. Self-culture, along with etiquette and dress, became an important way to distinguish oneself in a society leveled by democracy.68 The British-born but American-made journalist William Cobbett, sometimes known as Peter Porcupine, told his eager readers that “A journal should be kept by every young man.” Do not hesitate, he told them, to “Put down something against every day of the year, if it be merely a description of the weather . . . It disburdens the mind of many things . . . [and] It tends greatly to produce regularity in the conducting of affairs.”69 Feeling more pressed for time, aspiring diarists such as Lawrence or Hoppin could now take a shortcut to achieve that goal by choosing a ready-made diary that did much of the work for them. After all, the pocket diary oozed the kind of regimen these boys were supposed to emulate. Self-discipline was the virtue Waldo Flint had in mind when he gave a Marsh’s Pocket Diary, or Daily Remembrancer for 1848 to his twelveyear-old nephew Stephen Salisbury Jr. on New Year’s Day 1848. In his

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best hand, the young Salisbury carefully wrote on the inside cover: “Stephen Salisbury Jr. from Uncle Waldo Flint Jan 1st 1848.” A bank president and avid diarist, Flint hoped to instill in his young nephew an appreciation for daily record keeping. And Salisbury complied—for about a month. He recorded faithfully throughout January and filled in the spaces that Marsh allotted for each day. His entries consisted of purchases mostly (of a pair of kid gloves, for instance), visits from his Aunt Sally, or an outing to the opera. After January, his commitment fell off, dramatically. There are only two entries in the remainder of the volume. On March 31, Salisbury remarked, “My birth day Went to Boston.” In his last entry, he recounted the loss of his “best Canary”: “He got frightened at a hankerchief and dashed against the cage & then died in my hand.” 70 Not perhaps what Uncle Waldo expected from the fledgling diarist. While Flint may have encouraged his nephew to keep account of his expenses, he also hoped the daily habit would instill in him some discipline and improve the boy’s writing. Despite Salisbury’s lazy beginnings, his Uncle Waldo did not give up on him. Flint continued to present his nephew with a diary each year, and as Salisbury grew into a young man, he became a successful and disciplined gentlemen and as avid a record keeper as his uncle may have hoped. In 1850, it was Marsh’s Vest-Pocket Diary. By 1852, Marsh’s diary was replaced with Clayton’s Octavo Diary, which reserved a whole page for one day’s entry. At the top of the title page, Salisbury wrote “S. Salisbury Jr.’s Journal.” Now seventeen and still away at school, Salisbury fi lled every page with talk of his studies, letters from home, and his social engagements. Ushered forward by the pages of Clayton’s Octavo Diary, Salisbury developed a diary habit. He was so proud of what he had accomplished he congratulated himself on the diary’s last page. Under the heading for “Friday, December 31st, 1852,” Salisbury wrote: “I am now thankful I have kept a diary which will bring to mind the various little incidents in my life for one year.” Yet looking back on the year that had just passed, he still wished he had done better in his “Scholarship” and pledged to study harder in the coming year.71 Now Salisbury was as concerned as his Uncle Waldo about his self-improvement and used his diary to track his progress. More than a decade later, after Harvard Law and a stint in Central America studying Mayan ruins, Salisbury had graduated into a regular diary keeper. He was still using a Marsh Diary in 1863 when he recorded an evening at the theater where he saw none other than “J. W. Booth” in Richard III. He deemed the performance

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“Excellent.” 72 Uncle Waldo’s New Year’s gift had sparked in Salisbury a lifelong diary habit. Unlike instruction in letter writing, there were no manuals explicitly aimed at teaching young men and women how to keep a diary. The most a parent could hope for was a section reserved in an etiquette volume such as William Alcott’s Young Man’s Guide or an article in a leading periodical such as the American Ladies Magazine. Alcott offered his readers sample entries demonstrating how to embellish a mundane entry recording a day’s work in the field. Instead of recording at the close of one summer day that we “Began our haying. Mowed in the forenoon, and raked in the afternoon. Weather good,” the diarist should expand his remarks and reflect on his undertaking. Alcott’s diary entry for that same day would look more like: “Our haying season commenced. How fond I am of this employment! How useful an article hay is, too, especially in this climate, during our long and cold winters! We have fi ne weather to begin with, and I hope it will continue.” By encouraging such reflection in the diary’s pages, Alcott aimed to help the diarist improve his mind and prepare him for “usefulness,” or success.73 According to an 1834 advice column in the American Ladies Magazine, all women, if she be between fi fteen and twenty-five years of age and unmarried, should reserve at least fi fteen minutes a day for diary keeping. The writer explained that “keeping a Diary . . . is the only corrective of that fault of our age, excessive reading without reflection.” This daily obligation would also prevent them from “spending their time and thoughts on trifles” and enable them to read it over “at the end of the year.” At the same time, she should also “keep a regular account of her expenses,” the author advised. And in this way she would develop a habit of “calculating future consequences as well as present expenses, in order to practice a wise economy.” 74 According to this columnist, accounting, whether of time or money, was just as important for young women as it was for teenagers like Hoppin and Lawrence. In the absence of more expansive diary-keeping guides, the commercial diary was a perfect substitute since it provided instruction on every page. With little prompting from his Uncle Waldo, Stephen Salisbury knew what was expected of him. Marsh’s Pocket Diary told him how often (every day), how much (a few lines), and even what (“Interesting Events, Appointments, &c”) he should write. With the benefits of instilling discipline and encouraging selfreflection, the daily diary soon competed with the commonplace book

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in schoolhouses throughout the nation. While the commonplace book portrayed a “life by values” as users accumulated literary excerpts of “timeless stories . . . underlying moral virtues,” the diary depicted one’s “life by time” much like the novel. The commonplace book searched for the general or universal, while the diary was all about particulars.75 Instructors, including the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller who taught at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, began to compel their students to keep a daily diary. One of Fuller’s pupils, Mary Ware Allen, did not take immediately to the idea and said so in the opening pages of her school journal in December 1837: “I fi nd it is one of the rules of the school to keep a journal, and though I do not think I shall like to do it, it will be a very useful exercise.” Mary Service Steen inscribed her diary as the “Journal of Miss Mary Service Steen in Van Doren and David’s Institute for Young Ladies Philadelphia 1848.” 76 Emeline Moore also kept a diary while attending a Connecticut seminary for girls, and Frances Merritt Quick while at a Normal School in Saxonville, Massachusetts. The pages of Harry West’s and Kenneth Allen’s diaries are marked with blue pencil, evidence that their teacher at West Newton Academy in Massachusetts had checked their work afterward for spelling and grammar. Instead of digesting the words of others in a commonplace book, the young were allowed to look inward in search of themselves. Although unaccustomed to such an approach, Mary Ware Allen came to appreciate it in due time, acknowledging her early reluctance: Then it seemed a hard thing to sit down day after day, and write a record of the day, but now it is a great pleasure—and it will be a still greater pleasure to turn over these pages in future days. . . . But it is not so much for future pleasure, as present improvement, that we are required to write these journals, and I do sincerely hope the practice may be conducive to mine.

In this new age of individualism, it was now permissible, even encouraged, to focus on one’s self. As Mandana S. Greenwood put it, she hoped her diary would serve as “a mirror to show how and what and where I am.” 77 The self-improvement ethic was just as strong beyond the schoolhouse. While many students employed blank journals, rather than preprinted diaries, for their daily compositions, such expansive repositories were often impractical for their older counterparts in the working

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world such as Susan Brown. After all, students could rely on an extensive school day during which to compose lengthier entries than a daily planner would allow. But for many adults, a blank journal proved too ambitious. Choosing a daily planner over a blank volume, however, did not prevent working Americans from aspiring toward the same goal. Indeed, even in Lowell, factory owners promoted the fact that mill workers, fresh from the farm, might improve their minds during their hours of leisure. Only a week after arriving in Lowell, Susan Brown recorded that she “Went to the Institute” to attend a lecture or concert. Despite working twelve- to fourteen-hour days in the mill, Brown carved out time, sometimes twice a week, to take in a lecture or presentation somewhere in town. In many cases her attendance at such events was the only thing she recorded on a given day. On February 12, for instance, she wrote: “Attended G. W. Beard’s Temperance lecture in the City Hall. Snowy.” On March 1: “Went to the Institute. Pro. James C. Smith lectured on Geology.” Although Brown never referred explicitly to her plans for selfimprovement during that year in Lowell, she later acknowledged the role her diary played in such efforts when on the last page of her 1857 diary she reflected: “This ends the account with 1857. May the new year be spent more profitably.” 78 Whether or not the pun was intended, Brown, and her diary, blurred the lines between an account of money and an account of self. As she dutifully recorded her expenses and activities on a daily basis, Brown expected to reap the dividends. Clerks and other young men with professional aspirations expressed the same attitude toward their attempts to build character. Like Brown, they attended lectures, engaged in profitable reading, and enlisted their diaries as instruments in this project.79 N. Beekley of Norristown, Pennsylvania, opened his Stewart’s Diary for 1849 with great anticipation, announcing his decision to leave his home town for the big city of Philadelphia: “Am about leaving the type-sticking business for something else. viz: Keeping Books for the fi rm of Reeves, Buck & Co., who are very extensively engaged in the manufacture of iron.” Beekley spent much of that year, at least according to his diary, participating in sleighing parties, promenading with young ladies, going to the theater, or having a peek at “Barnum’s Museum.” Not exactly the kinds of activities advice writers recommended. No surprise, then, that Beekley, in summing up the changes in his “humble self” at year’s end registered some disappointment: “Even as regard my humble self, there has been somewhat of a change, but only as relates to my situations, in all other respects, there

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is no change with the single exception of being a year older. No richer nor poorer, nor no nearer being married.”80 So common were these yearend attempts to take stock that diary manufacturers often added space for December 31 to accommodate such reflections. James W. Cunningham, a Boston merchant, preferred to sum up the past year’s events at the beginning of his 1849 diary. On a front endleaf, Cunningham explained that 1848 “Being a very Eventful year I think best to recount some of them, before commencing a new Journal.” But rather than restricting himself to world events including “Revolution in all Central Europe,” wars in Germany, Denmark, Austria, and Lombardy, and “Gold mines . . . in California—immense quantities,” Cunningham felt obliged to include those occasions of interest only to himself and his family such as joining the “Cadets,” adding a partner in his dry-goods fi rm, and having “5 teeth extracted while under the influence of Cloroform.” Cunningham then began his daily account in a pocket book appropriate to his position: the Merchant’s Desk Diary. Published by Henry Anstice of New York, the volume promised to be “A Great Aid to a Slippery Memory” and invoked the “celebrated Locke” who remarked that “a daily note book, well kept, was good evidence of a correct man of business.” No longer just a portable account book, Anstice and his brethren understood the diary’s expanded role and stressed its importance in establishing the “coin of character.”81 Cunningham had no reservations about writing himself into history even though he was careful enough to label his personal entries as “minor events” in comparison to the revolutions of Europe. Indeed, his diary encouraged such self-importance. The same could be said of James Blake’s diary. In 1851, Blake had just moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, to manage the local gas company. This entry recorded on the second of January is typical: This has been a very cold though pleasant day. I have been in the office, attending to business; nothing of peculiar interest has transpired. Spent a little time at Comers, where I am taking lessons in Book-keeping. This afternoon went up to Aunt Everett’s, saw Sarah White & Sister Mary, who are making a visit there.

Blake did not feel obliged to record anything that did not apply to himself alone. Thus if “nothing of peculiar interest” happened to him, he left it at that. Only seventeen, Amos Armsby devoted his Pocket Diary

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for 1853 to events that must have seemed of utmost importance to the young man. Adding his name in pencil to the title page so that it read Pocket Diary of Amos Armsby of Millbury, Mass. for 1853, Armsby recounted a meeting of his debate club at which they debated “on the Aristocracy” and noted that the “discussion was quite animated.” Later the same week, he recorded his visit to a “Mr. Chamberlain” in Worcester in search of a position in his bookstore. Although he had no openings, “Mr. Chamberlain” told him Armsby would “have a situation” when a vacancy occurred, but there was no telling how long that might be. 82 Invited by the diary itself and encouraged by a culture that elevated selfinterest to a virtue, men like Cunningham, Blake, and Armsby wrote of things that were of “great moment” only to themselves. They were eyewitnesses of nothing, except their own lives. The pocket diary reinforced this feeling that their own words and experiences—no matter how humble—were the story. *

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But such men always seemed pressed for time, and that is why the pocket diary was such an efficient and inexpensive solution to the abiding need to keep account. The pocket diary proved a tremendous time saver. It allowed customers to more systematically “redeem the time” and apportion their days to accommodate more worthwhile pursuits. Time and the wasting of it was on the mind of many diarists. Matthias Weaver, a young art engraver in 1840s Philadelphia, confessed to his diary: “My time is passing very unprofitably as regards moral and intellectual advancement.” His remark was prompted by his visit to ice cream gardens, not once but twice that week.83 Weaver’s words echoed in lecture halls and college chapels where the clergy and educators invoked the importance of time. In December 1822, Philip Lindsly delivered two discourses titled Improvement of Time to students assembled in the chapel at the College of New Jersey in Trenton. In an effort to “improve all your time in the most profitable manner,” Lindsly told the assembly to fi nd amusements that are “rational, virtuous, seasonable, manly, and invigorating to body and mind” and to seek “knowledge . . . wherever it can be found.” Above all, Lindsly advised, “let order, and method, and system be adopted and rigorously maintained.”84 Not only did the pocket diary represent order, method, and system in its design, it required very little time for its diary commitment. To guard against any time wasting, John M. Wing, a stu-

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dent at the Pulaski Academy in New York, scribbled a schedule for his studies in the back of his Pocket Diary for 1858. He wrote: “Order of my Studying. Arithmetic untill recess foor noon. Algibra untill noon. Afternoon Rhettoric Lesson. . . . foregoing rules are to be strictly put in force.” Amos Armsby used a memoranda page in his 1853 pocket diary to record all of the books he had read in the past year and the date he fi nished reading them. He only had to refer back to the pages of his diary to determine the date he completed “Arabian Nights,” “Plutarch’s Lives,” or “History U.S. Vol 1.”85 A daily planner nudged reluctant diarists on toward the next day’s entry and provided a record of progress in little time. Women at home were not excused from the obligations of daily record keeping or the need to preserve time. Despite the advice of the columnist in the American Ladies Magazine who assumed a woman would abandon her diary once she married, the daily planner became a critical accessory for women managing a household. Industrialization and urbanization by the early nineteenth century accelerated the separation of home and work, leaving women at home to manage the family’s finances and run the operation. The rise of domesticity elevated housekeeping to the level of a science and, as with many subjects in this era of self-help, an advice literature arose to teach women how to approach her domain with an eye toward organization. Among the most comprehensive of domestic guides was Catharine Beecher’s best-selling Treatise on Domestic Economy in which she advised American women of the best way to economize one’s time: “The most powerful of all agencies, in this matter, is that habit of system and order, in all our pursuits.” Time and money, once again, went hand in hand. A housekeeper, according to Beecher, cannot maintain such systematic industry without paying equal attention to her expenses, and “Few women can do this, thoroughly, without keeping regular accounts.”86 Perhaps that is why many women in antebellum America adopted the commercial diary as a record of their domestic duties. It did not matter that the events that made up their lives consisted of sewing, washing, and cleaning. Diary producers, after all, invited “housekeepers” to use the portable diary for the keeping of accounts and ordering the affairs of their household. It was small enough to carry with them or slip into a pocket as they went about their work. Often, wives appropriated the diaries of husbands, as Sarah Watson Dana did in 1851 when she crossed out her husband’s entries about court dates and appeals in his Marsh’s Pocket Diary and substituted her own matters.87

Figure 3.5. Sarah Watson Dana crossed out a reminder for a court date in her husband’s 1851 diary when she later claimed it as her own. Image courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

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The diary, for these women, could be a tool much like a broom or an oven. They were never apologetic, or embarrassed, that their entries contained such dull matters. The beauty of the pocket diary for these housekeepers was that by virtue of its design, it required little time at all. They might fi ll in the few lines in the spare minutes before bed. Or they could scribble in the entries as they went about their day—waiting for dough to rise, letting the laundry soak, or sitting by the fire after dinner. Although more privileged than the average “housekeeper,” Victorine du Pont, the eldest daughter of the chemical company founder, may have been drawn to the printed diary for similar reasons, at least initially. From a young age, du Pont kept a strict account of her expenses. From 1815 to 1818, only in her twenties and already a widow, she enlisted a blank pamphlet with marbled covers to record her personal expenses. She listed every expense in minute detail, from “a black leghorn hat” to the “ribbon to trim it.” In the 1820s she was given, for several New Year’s days running, the gift of the American Ladies’ Pocket Book, full of literary selections and an extensive diary section for the listing of expenses and memoranda. But apart from noting “Nota’s birthday” and a few marriages, du Pont left the memoranda pages blank. Perhaps she saw this diary serving a more literary, than fi nancial, function. And yet by the 1840s, she found a printed diary that more closely suited her needs. It was known generally as Stewart’s Register. Published annually in Philadelphia, the diary served as a “Daily Register, for the Use of Families and Persons of Business” and contained “A Blank for every day in the year, for the record of interesting daily occurrences and future engagements.” Du Pont bought one each year from John B. Porter, a stationer and bookseller on Market Street in Wilmington, Delaware, very close to the du Pont family estate at Winterthur. Hoping to use it as a record of her personal expenses, she may have been attracted to its commercial features. With a one-page calendar and a table of days “very useful in the banking business,” the diary, divvied up into three days per page, got straight to the point. There weren’t poems or essays getting in the way of its principal function.88 Before she began her diary for the coming year, du Pont wrote under the heading for January 1: “Private expenses for 1843.” And although she continued to carry over her expenses from one day to the next, her daily entries encompassed matters nonfi nancial. Begun as an exercise in accounting, du Pont’s diary keeping evolved into a more personal endeavor. She remarked upon a New Year’s celebration in which “all the

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family were here except Sophy who was in Washington,” a “Scarlet fever” scare in the “neighborhood,” and “one of the worst accidents we have ever had” at the chemical factory where “19 men” were killed in an explosion. Du Pont reserved the top half of a day’s entry for the recording of expenses such as “half a dozen cakes,” “a box of Liddies Powders,” or “To S. Wagstaff for altering my black silk.” But below that she recorded visits from her sisters and their children, visits to church in a “jig” where she taught Sunday school, and various changes in the weather.89 Because her expenses on any given day hardly fi lled a day’s entry, the blank spaces encouraged her to write more, no matter how mundane. It was a pattern repeated over and over again, especially among female customers who never intended using their diaries for anything other than a daily expense account. Another young widow, Sarah Edes never went a day without a line in her Marsh’s Pocket Diary. On Friday she had her “Bl’k silk cut” for a dress she was making. By Saturday she “had a real cleaning up in the attics, took us all the morning ‘til dinner time.” She then “fixed up the little front chamber or room and the men came to pick up some curtains before we had fi nished.” A New Year’s gift from her husband, Rosina Moore used her 1857 Diary, Memoranda Book and Almanack in much the same way. On New Year’s Day, she reported going to town for a “Festival” with her husband and having “a good time.” But a few days later, she was back to her housework. Reflecting the drudgery of such duties, Moore wrote simply: “Have been washing a.m. quite tired.”90 Reminiscent of the du Pont daughters who rejected the more frilly and literary Ladies’ Pocket Book for a commercial diary, these women appeared very comfortable with the utilitarian format. It gave shape to their days and affi rmed that the humblest events were worth recording. It also demanded little time away from other, more pressing domestic matters. *

*

*

With so much effort focused on preserving time in such diaries, it stands to reason that the ruled pages would be sprinkled with references to clock time and that the urgency of mechanized time would pair comfortably with a stationery product pitched as a way to keep Americans in step, if not by the hour then by the day. But even as publishers added features that reflected an ongoing shift to mechanized time such as railroad timetables, their customers resisted any sudden transitions. Instead,

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many diarists avoided or severely restricted references to clock time in their entries and maintained timing practices of earlier generations such as marking events with the phrase “AM” or “PM.” For some like Susan Brown, such resistance signaled her efforts to use her pocket diary as a bulwark against change. This resistance would soften after the Civil War, especially as inexpensive watches made their way into the countryside and the railroads ushered in the standard time zones. But in this antebellum era of diary expansion, it seems ironic that the commercial diary failed to push users toward the accelerated rhythms of the clock since both served similar roles as timekeepers and disciplinarians. Perhaps it was simply a matter of pace. Diary time, which apportioned the days rather than hours, was fast enough for those interested in imposing order without succumbing to the more minute increments represented on the face of a clock. Diary customers could comfortably “redeem the time” without giving in to more accelerated regulation. Although Susan Brown never described the rigors of her workday in great detail, reformer Catharine Beecher provided a glimpse of factory life in an 1846 pamphlet she penned titled The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children. Among the “evils” of the factory system Beecher singled out in her scourge against industrialization was the breakneck pace dictated by the clock. After a midwinter visit to Lowell, Beecher reported “the facts” as she saw them to a group of Protestant clergy: Every morning I was wakened at five, by the bells calling to labor. The time allowed for dressing and breakfast was so short, as many told me, that both were performed hurriedly, and then the work at the mills was begun by lamp-light, and prosecuted without remission till twelve, and chiefly in a standing position. Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o’clock, the last part of the time by lamp-light. Then returning, washing, dressing, and supper occupied another hour. Thus ten hours only remained for recreation and sleep. Now eight hours’ sleep is required for laborers, and none in our country are employed in labor more hours than the female operatives in mills. Deduct eight hours for sleep and only two hours remain for shopping, mending, making, recreation, social intercourse, and breathing the pure air.91

Brown’s workdays appeared more unpredictable. She often left the mill early due to illness or if the mill’s wheels got clogged with ice. Aside

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from her erratic attendance, Brown’s entries also reveal her reluctance to be ruled by the clock, as she limited all references to clock time to her mill work. On March 11, she wrote “Came out of the mill at 4 o’clock.” On April 5, “Came home from the mill at three o’clock.” On April 10, “Lucy went to Middlesex at 7 o’clock. Did not go to work myself.” Oftentimes, Brown’s reference to clock time indicated that her schedule had somehow departed from the norm, as in the entry for April 15: “Back water—came out at noon.” “Back water” meant that the melting winter ice had swamped the mill’s water wheels, preventing normal operations and giving mill workers the equivalent of a “snow day.” Brown would return to work when the high water receded. In other instances, Brown accounted for time in larger increments that were more attuned to the slower pace of the diary. For instance, Brown used the phrases “AM” or “PM” to mark her social or personal engagements, as she did on April 23, remarking that she “Went with G. H. to Mr. Burknap’s P.M.” It was as if she resisted the clock’s precision in all matters unrelated to the mill. Brown preferred to mark time more slowly, adopting the ruled columns on her memo pages meant for recording expenses to track the weeks since she’d left home. The entries, just numbers listed adjacent to her daily notes, could easily be mistaken for expenses, until she gave voice to the span of time. On March 7, she wrote the numeral “7” in the accounts column, and on April 12 a solitary “12” in the same column with no explanation. Finally, on May 8, Brown revealed the meaning behind those figures. They represented the number of weeks she had been living and working in Lowell. Brown elaborated in the diary space reserved for May 8: “Sixteen weeks today! But it will not be sixteen weeks longer here.” Although it took a bit longer than sixteen weeks, Brown kept her promise to herself and left the “Middlesex” for good on September 21, 1843, recording quite uneventfully: “Started for home with Bickford.” 92 Among its many uses both fi nancial and personal, Brown’s diary helped accustom the factory girl to the demands of clock time even as she struggled against its insistence, preferring instead a more relaxed and natural tempo figured in the daily increments of her pocket diary. Like Brown, other diary customers acquiesced to clock time out of necessity, restricting its mention in their daily planners to activities related to work or travel. Just as Brown linked clock time with mill time, an anonymous New York bookkeeper employed his Daily Miniature Diary for 1856 to note the precise times he was due to conduct audits at local businesses. “Audit at Clays at 4,” he entered on or before April 15.

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Another unidentified diarist used the same diary brand for 1859 to record the comings and goings from a shop he tended, recording one particular Saturday that he was “at shop until 1/2 past 3.” In all other cases, their time references were intentionally vague, referring to periods such as “forenoon” or “evening” or enlisting the same coding Brown used of “AM” or “PM” to mark other social events. For instance, Frances Burgess of Cortland County, New York, divided the entries in her 1864 Pocket Diary into activities performed in the morning, afternoon, and evening, such as: Morning Mrs Smith came over to borrow my birdcage for Leilas bird. Forenoon mrs Davis done the baking I done the most of the work. Afternoon . . . night—George came down Easton came home this P.M. Evening Mrs Davis and I were very tired and laid down on the floor when Albert Smith came to ask me to go over to his house to a party. was very tired so did not go was very sorry I could not go.

Even after she was given a “new clock” as a New Year’s gift that she recorded “like it much,” she continued her habit of apportioning time as her grandparents might have: “Afternoon did not get dinner untill three. Web & Mate are still here. evening I went up to Aunt Hannahs to carry her a can of fruit or a New Years present came home.” Burgess conceded to clock time in rare instances, especially if borrowed from a railroad timetable. After receiving the gift of a new diary for New Year’s, Burgess noted that “Pa & Ma started for Dryden on the 1/2 7 oclock train.” 93 Travelers expressed a similarly divided attitude toward time since the clock’s precision seemed necessary only if trying to catch a train or steamer for elsewhere. An unidentified miner from Rockland, Maine, recorded his approach to the gold fields of California in 1854 by the times of arrival and departure at various landmarks: “we arrived in Stockton at

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3 oclock this morning. left stockton at 7 O clock on the coach for Camposeco. took lines at the Spring Valley House. arrived in Camposeco at 5.” Passing through Cincinnati on their way to St. Peter, along the Minnesota River, in 1848, the Allens, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, couple, purchased The Traveler’s Register and River Road Guide: Containing a New and Correct Map of the Rivers of the Mississippi Valley. The publishers, Robinson and Jones, had interleaved the three- by five-inch pamphlet with blank pages, which gave the Allens just enough room to note the distance they had traveled and the times of arrivals and departures. Opposite the February calendar page, Allen wrote: 2 Left St. Louis Friday eveg at 6 oclock—arrive 3 Galena Tuesday morng at 6 oclock 4 2 3/4 days 450 miles 61 hours[.]

Once such travelers arrived at their destinations, however, all references to clock time ceased. Whether they were erecting a tent, sinking a shaft, cooking for the crew, or “washing down the sluice,” the exact time of day no longer mattered.94 Rather it was the work they accomplished at the end of each day that added up and that merited reporting. By that time, the clock had served its purpose, but their commercial diaries remained critical to marking their days. Although it is difficult to know in every case why a customer eschewed clock time in his diary entries, reliability of any mechanical timepiece, whether manufactured at home or abroad, continued to be an issue even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Thanks to American entrepreneurs such as Chauncy Jerome and Eli Terry and the introduction of interchangeable parts, clock production soared and brought timepieces within reach of even modest rural households. A recent study of the mid-Hudson family found that by midcentury three-quarters of rural families in Greene County, New York, owned a clock or watch. But even if clock and watch ownership climbed, such mechanical devices did not immediately introduce a new sense of time.95 Among the reasons was dependability. In early January 1855, Ferdinand Crossman of South Sutton, Massachusetts, wrote out a familiar refrain in his Cambridgeport Pocket Diary: “Paid for reparing watch, 25.” Presumably the 25 re-

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ferred to “cents,” the phrase “repa[i]ring watch” echoed in the pages of many commercial diaries. If the watches were not out for repair, diary customers often noted the lengths they went to keep their clocks “on time.” Peter Vroom of Morristown, New Jersey, reserved an entire page in his diary to note how often he set his clock and how many minutes it was “off”: Jany 14 . . . 4 slow Feb. 26 Set the Clock March 7th It stopped This was not a fair trial May 9 Set the Clock

Even though Vroom appeared eager to give his clock the benefit of the doubt, noting in one case “This was not a fair trial,” the fact remained that the time told on the face of a clock could not always be trusted. Vroom’s reverence for his flawed timepiece reminds us that clocks served as objects of ornamentation before functioning as dependable timekeepers.96 Fortunately, Vroom, Crossman, and others had an alternative and could always rely upon their commercial diaries to place themselves in time. Even if some of their customers were reluctant to surrender to clock time, diary producers intended to keep up with the times by adding tables to their products that incorporated mechanized time. Graham Taylor’s Daily Pocket Remembrancer included a timetable that conveniently listed the local time for various US towns and cities when the clock struck noon in New York.97 The most common timetable was even more sophisticated than that offered in Taylor’s commercial diary. Titled “Distance, Time, and Difference in Time,” the table listed dozens of cities across the country, including places as far west as Salt Lake City, Utah, and San Francisco, California, and provided three columns, each employing a different measurement to indicate how far removed the locale was from New York City. The fi rst column measured the distance in miles. The second, called “R.R. Time,” converted that distance into hours it would take to travel by train to that destination. The third column, with the heading “Dif. in Time,” allowed a customer to set his watch once he arrived since it told the user how many hours, minutes, and seconds the location was behind New York. So, for instance, if someone were traveling to Chicago, they learned that it was 955 miles west of and 53 minutes

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and 58 seconds behind New York and it would take 36 hours to get there by train.98 By adding clock time to these mileage tables, diary producers helped customers, especially those journeying west, comprehend distance by converting miles into time. The addition of the “Diff. in Time” column was just another way of grasping how vast the country was, especially when one read that Sacramento, California, was 3 hours, 3 minutes, and 56 seconds behind New York. Aside from keeping the commercial product up to date, these timetables conveyed to customers, even those reluctant to be governed by the clock, that clock time was critical to negotiating one’s way in the world. Even Susan Brown would have to admit it would be difficult to live without it. Diary manufacturers were careful to incorporate new views of time into the natural order of things. There remained a sense of continuity with the past. Almanacs had always served as a timepiece, though one connected to the heavens rather than a manufactured object. Producers did not abandon more traditional notions of time that remained central to its astronomical features such as the times of sunrise and sunset and the moon’s phases. In fact, many enlisted iconic symbols of time in cover illustrations and calendar headings. In the 1840s, John F. Brown used a mythical representation of time for the front cover of his Almanack, Pocket Memorandum, and Account Book. Holding a scythe in his right hand and a set of reins in the other, a winged version of Father Time stood on top of the Earth and urged a troika of horses forward.99 Father Time insured the persistence of time’s passage, proceeding without interruption toward eternity. Later, other diary manufacturers would adopt the same theme for their title pages.100 Brown’s illustration reminded customers that his diary might mark time, but it could not prevent it from fleeting. The efforts of diary manufacturers to straddle the changing times underscored the extent to which the diary had made time more personal long before watches became commonplace. The pocket diary, in other words, helped users own the time, making it less God’s time and more their own. Recall the heading George Washington used at the top of each diary page: “Where & How my Time is Spent.” In antebellum America, this trend of making time a personal matter included housewives, schoolchildren, clerks, mill girls, the same audience diary publishers targeted. While there remained for some a spiritual dimension to this reckoning, others preferred to see time more intimately as an earthbound concern. Once dictated by agricultural seasons or religious cy-

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cles, time now passed according to life’s accumulating years. Influenced by Enlightenment notions of personal identity, time—a crucial dimension of the physical world—became “the shaping force of man’s individual and collective history.”101 Accordingly, diarists assembled their own personal timelines that had little to do with redeeming the time in search of salvation. Wife of attorney and author Richard Henry, Sarah Watson Dana probably paged through her previous diaries before constructing a timeline of her early life on the memoranda pages at the back of one of her diaries. She began her life’s history with her marriage in 1841, included the births of her four children, a visit to Niagara in 1845, summer vacations in Manchester, and ended with the family’s move to a new home on Brattle Street in Cambridge in 1852. In a kind of shorthand, the last thing she wrote was: “52 winter Brattle House Nov. House being built on New land. I papered & painted & furnished & went into it. March 1.”102 For Dana, time was dictated not by the passing of seasons or the approach of God’s providence but by the rhythms of family life—marriages, births, deaths—as she recorded them in her diaries. Encouraged by the pocket diary’s design, Dana saw time not as a circle but as a straight line proceeding onward through her family trials and triumphs. Customers kept a close watch on time in the pages of their diary. With each passing year, each New Year’s day, they tallied their progress through time, toward fi nancial success, familial harmony, and selfimprovement. The pocket diary helped its users move from more traditional notions of timekeeping such as the cycling of the seasons to less natural modes in their own way and at their own pace. Although entrepreneurs such as John Marsh did a fi ne job of adapting the product to answer the changing times and meet the needs of an expanded audience, there were some uses even the most prescient businessman could not have anticipated. Instead of using the cash accounts section of her 1851 diary for expenses, Sarah Watson Dana converted it into a grade book for her three young daughters, Lilly, Charlotte, and Sally, aged five to nine respectively. She kept track of their absences, “improprieties,” and how often they were corrected for their “bad sitting.” Jane Smith transformed a memorandum page at the back of her commercial diary into a table of every letter she had written and received over the course of the year. Perhaps not coincidentally, producers would later add a section to certain pocket designs allowing customers

Figure 3.6. A memo page from Sarah Watson Dana’s 1875 diary where she sketched a brief chronology of her marriage. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

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to record their exchange of letters. Schoolteacher Ann Stoddard preferred to use a month’s worth of diary pages in her 1866 Pocket Diary as a recipe book, noting without apology in a blank reserved for October 31, “These pages I devote to the writing down of Receipts.” They included “Ellas pie crust,” “Mount Pleasant Cake,” “Railroad Pudding,” “Washington Pie,” and “Marble Cake.” At the back of the pocket volume, Stoddard’s memorandum section became an improvised autograph album as friends left her verses to which they signed their names. “When this you spy / Please think of J. Elvas,” read one such ditty. Another appeared more heartfelt, signed by “Eddie Lyndon”: “I wish thee a happy home / Where sin nor sorrow stay / A home where angels sweetly sing / Redeeming love for age.” Susan Brown, too, was unapologetic when she chose to use the columns in her 1843 Lowell Almanac designed for listing expenses to count the days since she left home.103 Despite its restrictive format, resourceful customers always found ways to innovate. They pushed at the strictures of the design to make the commercial product meet their particular needs. Such innovation often seemed inadvertent or unintentional, enacted on the spur of the moment. In another unexpected turn, diarists on occasion moved beyond the commonplace and used the diary in a confessional mode as friend or confidant. Once diary manufacturers moved “cash accounts” into a separate section at the back of the commercial product, that left more room in the daily spaces to register some hint of their feelings. Even though producers intended customers employ that space left uncluttered by financial accounts for more personal matters, they could not have predicted the flood of feelings unleashed in those confi ned spaces. Just as in the case of other adaptations, there appeared to be a degree of serendipity to the admissions that found their way into such daily planners. One gets the sense from dozens of such entries that the writer might not have written anything if not for the empty space open on the page inviting them to vent. For instance, Adelaide Crossman got home from Sunday meeting and “found uncle Miltons folks here. Grandmother mad.” In frustration, she closed her diary entry that day in the late fall of 1855 with the phrase “I am out of patience” and signed it “Adda.” Thankful that his father had recovered from a recent illness, James Blake hoped in the pages of Clayton’s Quarto Diary for 1851 “that he may live long in this world happily, and that I may be spared and situated in such a manner that I can be a comfort to him in his declining years.” At the end of the school year at the Pulaski Academy, John Wing, only thirteen, con-

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fessed to his Pocket Diary for 1858 how sad he felt about being separated from his best friend, George Porter: “the happiest moments of my life we spent in his society . . . how soon do all earthly joys pass away. he is gone and we have parted.” Feeling stuck and unhappy in Lowell, Susan Brown occasionally gave in to temptation and found space in her diary to voice her misery. On August 18, she wrote, “Seven months since I first entered the Middlesex—Since I saw home! Alone & among strangers! Oh, when shall I return?”104 Brown’s complaint is one of perhaps a halfdozen in a year’s worth of entries, indicating such usage was unplanned. The same could be said for most customers. Many diarists never intended to unburden themselves in their pocket books, but their emotions often got the better of them and the empty page, equipped with no fi lters, welcomed any and all comments as long as there was room. Armed with a pocket diary that affi rmed the significance of one’s daily doings, diarists stuttered toward a more selfreflective mode as they wrote of everyday concerns. Obviously, the format was not so rigid that customers couldn’t bend it to meet their needs. Sometimes, having so little room to write may have been a good thing. It saved diarists from themselves, as it did Jane Smith Fiske whose entry one November weekday ran well into the margins before she could express her true feelings. She ended in a huff: “Jettie and I washed & then I fi xed up my stove & lots more truck all myself as my husband isn’t worth shucks to do everything for his wife. & if I had more room I’d say more about it.”105 Perhaps Fiske’s rant saved her husband a verbal lashing. Her diary, unfortunately, remained silent on the matter though it surely made Fiske feel better to have grumbled to her silent witness. Aside from cutting short painful tirades, there was another way in which the daily planner’s regimented design could work in a customer’s favor: its system kept many people writing. Such daily regularity served as the perfect antidote to the “long-neglected journal.” Its preformatted layout of days relieved writers of having to fi ll a blank page and encouraged constancy. Each of those pages, requiring only a few lines, asked for so little that it allowed even the most reluctant or recalcitrant diarists to carry on. With the best of intentions, Anna Cushing, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, began a blank journal for 1844 just after New Year’s. Cushing had intended for a long time “to resume the habit of putting my thoughts on paper” and thought the fi rst Sabbath of the new year a “fitting time” to recommence her “long-neglected Journal.” Among her New Year’s resolutions was a promise to write in her journal every day.

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Despite her good intentions, it did not take long for Cushing to break her promise. The next entry in Cushing’s journal was dated a week later. She wrote: “A week has passed without any record, indeed I do not think I shall resolve to write every day, and then shall not break my resolution.” There is only one more entry in Cushing’s 1844 journal, dated January 20. Apparently, she could not even stick to writing every week. Cushing, once again, abandoned her journal. Later in life, however, Cushing did fulfi ll her need to write every day, only this time she chose a daily planner manufactured by the Standard Diary Company.106 Frances Merritt Quick of Saxonville, Massachusetts, was more explicit than Cushing about her diary neglect. Like Cushing, she resolved in March 1855 “to treat this much neglected duty more justly.” She believed there was “much that is pleasant in the duty.” However, Quick confessed that she often struggled with her words, explaining that “my thoughts now and then get pent up, or come tumbling out in such disorder that I know not how to treat them.”107 Quick was writing in a blank composition book. She might have found some comfort in the order a preformatted diary imposed. Cushing and Quick were two among dozens. Many Americans began diaries in a blank journal or composition book, only to abandon them a day, a week, or a month later. So common was this dilemma, in fact, that it was immortalized in fiction with the tale of Grace Middlebrook: One Year in My Life. Written in the style of a diary, the story begins with young Grace Middlebrook, a teenager in her fi rst year out of school, “almost resolved not to keep a journal any more.” She was embarrassed by the “dreadful vacancies” in her diaries and noticed that “when there is most going on, I don’t write at all.” Then her father gave her a New Year’s gift: “a new diary, nicer than any I have had before.” He inscribed it with her name and underneath it, in “his bold handwriting,” the Latin phrase “Nulla dies sine linea” (“No day without a line”). Explaining that this would be an “important year” for her, Middlebrook’s father hoped his gift would encourage her to write every day in a project of genteel self-improvement. And she did. In her daily entries, Middlebrook remarked on the mundane, such as buying an “Astrachan cloak” and reading “a History of the French Queens” as an informal continuation of her schooling, and the more aspirational seeking to be more deserving of the “mercy of Christ.”108 It was perhaps no accident that a diary manufacturer would later adopt the phrase “Nulla dies sine linea” for his title page.109 The directive underscored just how easy it was to achieve a cul-

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tural habit that provided a multitude of benefits both practical and more consequential. Such modest expectations may have been what kept Susan Brown, and countless others, writing. Once she left the mill, Brown maintained the habit. Her 1843 Lowell Almanac and Pocket Memorandum was her fi rst pocket diary but hardly her last. She owned no fewer than sixty-five daily planners, most of the page-a-day variety. At sixty-five years multiplied by 365 days, that is a lot of pages to fi ll. She may not have been able to do it if she’d been expected to keep a longer journal. She would not have had the time: to keep a job, tend to a household as well as a husband and daughter. After Lowell, Brown returned to school teaching; then worked as a store clerk in a Boston shop called Remick’s; ran a boardinghouse; married Alexander Forbes; adopted a daughter named Dorcas; moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where her husband opened a successful department store; and eventually accumulated enough wealth to buy back her ancestral farm, “Fatherland Farm,” where the couple retired in 1895. Along that journey her daily planner was always close at hand to document, no matter how abbreviated, Brown’s expenses and experiences. Brown had no qualms pairing the utilitarian with the more sentimental. She enumerated the garments she’d worked on in 1849 to supplement her meager teaching wages, including “one course chemise,” “two linen handkerchiefs,” and a “Flannel petticoat”; copied a knitting pattern for a pair of socks on an empty memo page for 1851; listed the books she’d read in January 1857, including Leila Ada, Converted Jewess and The Cross and the Crown; and transcribed a recipe for eggnog in 1858. Such lists seemed appropriate to the function of the commercial product. Still, Brown also chose to slip inside the pages of her Columbian Perpetual Diary for 1857 a torn piece of newsprint from the Boston Herald on which was written the phrase “Miss Brown I love you” in pencil, presumably a token from her future husband. It was also in her annual diary that Brown found space to paste a later news clipping containing her daughter’s engagement announcement. These more heartfelt additions may help explain why Brown saved every one of her commercial planners, a veritable archive spanning six decades and illustrating the gradual evolution of the product from embellished almanac to a trademarked brand. By the time Brown was fi nished, she had adopted the most popular version in the country: the Standard Diary. On January 3, 1907, she turned that diary over to her companion, “M. E. Guthrie,” and asked her to take up the daily task. In that

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day’s entry, her companion wrote: “Last writing of Susan E. P. Forbes.” With the help of her companion, the bedridden Brown carried on into 1908, remarking on her many visitors and the state of her failing health. Until the bitter end, her pocket diary satisfied all of Brown’s needs in a neat, tidy, and affordable package. Brown often immortalized her diary purchases with an inscription written on an endleaf, as she did in 1871: “Diary—bought Jan. 7th at Whitney & Adam’s—75 cts.” It never seemed to bother Brown that her diary came from a store.110 A generation after Aitken’s flop, Americans just like Brown had come around to this diary that allowed for only a few lines per day. While each diarist may have had his or her own reason for doing so, there were some broad trends in this diary conversion. City folk were turned onto the format before country: the daily diary remained primarily an urban product until after the Civil War when farmers embraced it as readily as their almanacs. Rich before poorer: it would not enlist converts among a growing urban middle class until producers shaved the price and made it more utility than luxury. Men before women: it was originally meant as a commercial tool but with literacy rates expanded among women soon became a household necessity. For some it was a diary progression. In the 1810s and ‘20s, Boston minister Andrew Bigelow used blank journals as diaries. By the 1830s, he graduated to interleaved versions of Robert B. Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanack. He then tried out Brown’s Almanack and Pocket Memorandum until he settled on none other than Marsh’s Pocket Diary in 1848, a format to which he remained loyal until his death.111 The rise of the daily diary was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It took a convergence of forces to lead producers and consumers to the same diary format. Although cultural critics of the day might have considered it a crutch, a Protestant diary “lite” or mere engagement calendar, the commercial diary fostered an expansion in diary keeping that could not be explained simply by rising literacy or a generation on the move. Not everyone could be a George Templeton Strong, the famed chronicler of mid-nineteenthcentury life who spent days cogitating over the form his diary would take and devoted hours to its upkeep. Few had the time or money to dedicate to long spells of diary keeping. A wonderful by-product of the industrialization of the book trades, the pocket diary was perfectly timed to meet the personal and fi nancial needs of a new clientele: housewives, clerks, mill workers, and even schoolchildren. Deceptive in its simplicity, the pocket diary also provided users with a

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sense of order, a feeling especially rare in this frenzied age. After all, the events of every day could be quite unsettling. Merchants lost their businesses and their reputations to bankruptcy. Country boys confronted a strange and new urban landscape in search of work. Women rallied in vain for abolition and women’s rights. Settlers left friends and family for land and opportunity out West. As a way of coping, some found solace in religion, others in politics. Many turned to the daily diary. The habit could be constraining and liberating at the same time. For many, it began as a record of expenses or daily chores and, in time, became something more: a disciplinarian, timekeeper, domestic manual, or confidant. Despite its rigid appearance, the format proved quite malleable as customers adapted it to suit their individual needs. Aided by the rich cultural and social developments of the nineteenth century, such as the rise of the middle class and the attendant push toward self-improvement, the daily diary moved from accounting accessory to universal necessity. As they adhered to the format and gave it something to account for each of their days, diarists ended up discovering more than just an escape from the feeling of bedlam: they found themselves. Diary producers and consumers may not have agreed on why the daily diary proved so popular in antebellum America. Marsh and his counterparts would surely have mentioned the value of owning a portable account book. Conduct writers may have invoked the word discipline and the pocket diary’s ability to instill a useful habit among young and old. Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century, there had occurred a diary convergence, a point at which manufacturers in search of a steady seller had settled on the perfect format just as customers discovered its innumerable uses. Through trial and error, diary entrepreneurs, borrowing much from predecessors, produced a form that spoke well to consumers living in a new cultural milieu. Perhaps the key to the daily diary’s success was its unwitting selfcenteredness. Asking for nothing outside the realm of the user, the daily planner encouraged individuals to create an account of their own lives. With each entry they created an identity that was clearly their own and connected to no one. By allowing them that space, the diary reinforced the notion that their lives were of great value and unlike any other. With that in mind, they accepted a store-bought surrogate and still managed to produce a singular life record. If someone were to pick up Marsh’s Pocket Diary today, they might consider it a relic, a peculiar piece of the past. But it was really very modern in the ways it encouraged and re-

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flected the self. Now it was up to Marsh’s successors to transform the product into a national rite, convincing the public that the pocket diary was as American as apple pie and baseball. Despite Aitken’s admission that he stole his design from the “Mother Country,” the daily planner in the years following the Civil War grew into nothing less than an “American” brand.

Chapter Four

Making a Diary Standard

T

ucked inside Montgomery Ward’s 1895 catalog, the promotion on the cover of its forty-page “Book Department” is easy to miss. Rivaling Sears Roebuck’s mail-order “bible” in heft, Montgomery Ward’s Fall and Winter issue that season numbered 600 pages and hawked everything from men’s hosiery to 1,500-pound steel road graders. Begun in 1872 to market goods to “Patrons of Husbandry,” the Chicago merchant’s modest sales circular had in a single decade exceeded its own expectations in reaching customers in the farthest outposts of the American countryside. As long as postage and payment was received in advance, there was little Montgomery Ward and Company couldn’t deliver to your doorstep. Rather than feature the classics, encyclopedias, primers, or Bibles on the opening page of its book section, Montgomery Ward chose to display what had become an equally lucrative publishing staple: a daily planner. The book department announced the publication of “The Standard Diaries for 1895.” A direct outgrowth of the pocket diaries of Marsh’s generation, the Standard Diary emerged in the post– Civil War era as the leader in commercial diary brands. Born in a modest bookshop in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, what began as a humble pocket planner marketed to locals became a national trademark that promoted the benefits of diary keeping beyond the city limits and into the most modest rural homes. With the help of the Rural Free Delivery, established in 1896, and Montgomery Ward’s sales agents, the Standard Diary delivered on all the promises laid out in its initial advertisement. It was national in scope with “spaces for recording weather, thermometer and correct almanac anywhere in U.S.” It was universal with variable features such as “ladies’ sizes [containing] calls and letters received and answered.” It was indis-

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Figure 4.1. The opening page of Montgomery Ward’s “book department” in its 1895 national catalog promoted the release of “The Standard Diaries for 1895.” Published in Joseph J. Schroeder Jr., Montgomery Ward & Co. 1894–95 Catalogue & Buyers Guide No. 56 (Northfield, IL: DBI Books, 1977), 31.

pensable as “valuable reference books or as record or daily memorandum books, and the fi ner styles are pocket books also; supplying three very useful things in one.”1 What was not spelled out in the blurb was an advantage that even its manufacturers did not fully appreciate. Like the mail-order catalog that promoted it, the Standard Diary connected customers to a world beyond their farms. It staved off feelings of isola-

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tion by helping them document their lives alongside their purchases and placed them within a virtual nation of diarists and commercial goods. Bridging the past and future, the Standard Diary moved its users through time in a comforting and reassuring way with everyday tools for organizing and managing their lives. Even as the country seemed to get bigger and wider, Americans felt more closely connected, not simply through the imposition of standard time zones or mail-order catalogs but with the help of a newly ubiquitous stationery product. Unlike an almanac that was more parochial and reflected a particular place, the post–Civil War diaries manufactured by large corporations such as Kiggins and Kellogg and the Standard Diary Company stressed their universality. Everything about the new designs and added benefits signaled that this was a diary for all Americans no matter where they lived or their station in life. The Standard Diary suggested that diary keeping was a habit attainable and desirable for anyone willing to pay a modest sticker price. It was a powerful message that helped create a sustainable diary brand. By the end of the nineteenth century, diary entrepreneurs transformed what was once a businessman’s accounting accessory into a record-keeping standard. Genteel yet generic, diaries such as the American Diary and the Standard Diary appealed to a national audience. Due to improvements in technology and mass production, publishers could manufacture enough varieties to satisfy individual choice. Between its covers, the pocket diary embraced the paradoxes of postbellum America that paired industrial technology with gentility and national identity with individualism. By the 1880s, Kiggins and Tooker had added “e pluribus Unum” to the title page of its Excelsior Diary. A national motto, it was probably just another attempt at branding. 2 Yet the phrase reflected the diary equally well: out of many, one. As generic as it was fresh off a bookstore shelf, it became unique as soon as one made his or her fi rst entry. It was easily made personal, a version of oneself. Publishers, once again, relied on technologies such as lithography to give the daily planner a makeover. With a slick, color graphic of the zodiac on its title page, the Standard Diary was an organizer we might recognize. Gone were the quaint, antiquarian titles of the antebellum era that favored effusion over brevity. Instead, diary producers crafted titles that aimed for the generic, choosing names in line with the era’s new attitude toward marketing and promotion. 3 Rather than selling customers

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on a single entrepreneur’s reputation for fi ne craftsmanship as in Marsh’s Pocket Diary or Stewart’s Registers, they adopted titles with broader, more universal messages such as the Excelsior Diary, the American Diary, and of course the Standard Diary. But it wasn’t just about appearances. The Standard Diary didn’t just look modern; it was modern. Even as producers paid homage to the product’s almanac past by retaining features such as sunrise and sunset tables and lists of eclipses, they added modern details that superseded the more dated fi xtures. For instance, the Standard Diary devoted an entire page to “The Metric System,” another to laying out the intricacies of the “New Standard Time,” and a third to “New Weather Signals.” Anticipating the stickers mothers would in the future affi x to the telephone or the refrigerator, the Standard Diary also boasted a section of “Antidotes for Poison” and “Help! In Case of Accidents.”4 Another way the daily planner looked forward rather than back was its stance toward the nation. It emphasized the collective unity of the United States on every page. It began on the title page where the nation was not just an ideal but became a fact. Producers were not selling customers on the benefits of the Boston diary or the New York diary. It was the American Diary, the National Diary, or the Standard Diary suitable for any American. Beyond the title page, engravings of iconic national scenes decorated the calendar section, most notably an early depiction of baseball identified as “Our National Game.” This shift seems especially significant on the other side of the Civil War when many on both sides of the confl ict sought unity after the shattering divisions of war. 5 Like its predecessors, the Standard Diary reflected the era in which it was created. Its producers leveraged the technologies and systems of advertising and marketing of a new consumer culture to deliver an item of luxury to the masses. Once a product designed for the well to do, the affordable yet refi ned daily planner of the Gilded Age spoke to customers’ cravings for connections and order and answered needs in matters of time and money that would bring them into the modern age. The Standard Diary’s unbridled success demonstrates just how readily Americans responded to such changes. But before that could happen, the blank book moguls of John Marsh’s era had to survive the economic and distribution challenges of the turbulent war years. Less than a handful of fi rms performed such a feat, and at least one managed to use the confl ict to its advantage by courting an entirely new clientele: the Union soldier. The man responsible for that strategy was Edwin Dresser, father of

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the Standard Diary. Although he came to the diary business relatively late, his timing may have been just right. It was the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War, and Dresser, like John Marsh before him, was looking for his niche in American publishing. He tried book publishing for a short time with Harper and Brothers in New York City. He tried bookbinding in Concord, Massachusetts. He even tried his hand as a literary agent, lasting only a year. Then he met Eben Denton, who had established a small blank book fi rm in 1850 over a grocery on Main Street, later Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge. Diaries were just a small part of Denton’s large stock. Following the lead of other blank book sellers, Denton copied what had proven to be a successful format and did little to distinguish his from the rest.6 His sales, as a result, were respectable but local. Dresser and the Civil War would change all that. Dresser bought out Denton’s share of the business and soon after the Civil War turned the fledgling fi rm into a national venture. Years later in a promotional pamphlet about the beginnings of what Dresser renamed the Standard Diary Company, a local historian wrote that “Nearly every soldier in the Union Army carried a Cambridgeport diary in his knapsack.” 7 A bit exaggerated, the statement had a kernel of truth, acknowledging that the Civil War helped nationalize diary sales. More than anything, the Civil War delivered a new audience to entrepreneurs such as Dresser eager to capitalize on it. The Northern rank and fi le was full of soldiers who had never owned a diary before. While some may have preferred a blank sheet of paper, plenty of others turned to an unpretentious stationery item that could, by the outbreak of the Civil War, be purchased in almost any book or general store in the North. The pocket diary was well suited for this cadre of fledgling diarists and their record keeping, which was often done on the fly without much forethought or grand intention. A pocket diary made it all so easy. So compact and light, it took up little room in their knapsacks. It instructed even the most novice writer of its benefits. With their diary at hand, they almost always knew what day it was, how long until their next furlough, their next visit home. Soldiers also relied on the almanac matter in their daily planners to time sunrise and sunsets, important factors in the execution of military operations. 8 It is difficult to know how evenly distributed the pocket diary was along the battle lines. A survey of surviving examples suggests that it was more prevalent among the Union ranks, from the top brass to the lowliest private, than those fighting for the Confederacy. After all, the

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daily planner was born in the great publishing centers of the Northeast and possessed an East Coast, urban air that may not have appealed to a sectionally minded Southerner.9 Many of these Civil War diaries started out as gifts. In October 1863, Jefferson Moses, a private in Company G of the 93rd Illinois Infantry, returned to his Freeport home for a brief furlough. Before he left, his father gave him a three- by five-inch diary with a tuck flap, a pencil, and two pockets inside. Moses’s entries were irregular at fi rst, perhaps because he was confi ned to a convalescent camp where he was recuperating from an illness he contracted at Vicksburg. But soon he was writing daily and rarely missed a day until his discharge in June 1865. When he completed his fi rst diary, his father sent him another. Moses just kept on writing, mostly about the weather (“mudy around our tent and prety cold”), the food (“dinner which consisted of a little coffee and a little meat that wasn’t fit for a dog to eat”), and his persistent loneliness (“It is very lonesome today. I wish the cruel war was over so I do”).10 Private Charles Abbey was camped near Petersburg, Virginia, when he received a New Year’s gift—an 1865 Diary—from Bill Eccles, a friend back in his hometown of Cohoes, New York, a small river town just north of Albany. On the endleaf of his 1863 Pocket Diary, Ephraim Dawes, a major in the 53rd Division of the Ohio Volunteers, noted that the volume was a gift from John D. Morse, a fellow soldier and perhaps also a friend from home. Before the war, Dawes had used a blank notebook for his record keeping.11 They may have been short on supplies, on food, on fresh water, but these Union soldiers seemed to have a new diary come New Year’s Day. Carefully worded inscriptions on the front endleaves of some Civil War diaries reveal another, very poignant reason many soldiers kept such faithful daily records. Should they fail to return, they hoped to give their loved ones a keepsake that might offer a glimpse of their last days. A mechanic and shoemaker in Boylston, Massachusetts, before the war, Henry White began his diary for 1862 with the words “If I Fall I desire that this book with my effects including my Revolver may be sent to my Brother John C. White No. 6 Front Street, Worcester Mass & by him handed over to my wife. Sarah L. White of Bolyston Mass.” and signed it “Henry White Sargent Co. E. 21st Mass. Vol.” Luckily, though wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1864, White returned to his wife and family. His last entry reads: “We started for home on the 6 PM train. 24 hours after I was where I often wished to be. At Home that

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place doubly dear to the soldier.” William Green, a lieutenant in the 4th Metropolitan Guard of the New York Volunteers, asked in his inscription that his diary, if found, be forwarded to his uncle at the Office of the Central Park Commission in New York City. Sadly, that may be just what someone did. Wounded at the Battle of Pleasant Hill in Louisiana on April 9, 1864, Green was taken to St. James Hospital in New Orleans. On Friday, May 6, his last diary entry, Green wrote as if in a child’s hand: “Arm very painful all day long numbers of surgeons xamined my arm & it is decided to amputate it tomorrow morning & I am pleased to have it done. Two large abcesses are forming on the arm + it is terribly painful.”12 He died a week later. Then a nurse, or perhaps a matron, seeing the inscription written so carefully inside his diary gathered up his belongings, his revolver, and his last diary, and shipped them home. For those traveling west in the years before and after the Civil War, the daily planner delivered similar benefits like portability and ease of use. Just think about a cramped cabin below deck on an ocean-going steamer or a tarpaulin-draped wagon stacked with trunks, barrels of rations, and sundry supplies. A heavy, hardbound ledger was too cumbersome to scribble in while the teams of oxen trudged onward. But a miniature book might be tucked safely inside a shirt or pocket to guard it from salt water, rain, snow, mud, or any other environmental nuisance that migrants and soldiers routinely encountered. Some diaries could be purchased with a tuck closure, a flap that folded around the volume to guard its contents from the elements or prying eyes. Others included tiny Faber pencils slipped into a slot along the inside of the protective flap. Nevertheless, unless a traveler planned ahead and bought a pocket diary before leaving home, she was not likely to fi nd one along the Overland Trail. For that reason and because many diarists likely discarded their store-bought planners once they copied their accounts into fancier journals, fewer examples survive than in the papers of Civil War veterans. Both Major Ephraim Dawes and Lieutenant William Green carried a “Denton & Wood” diary with them to the front. Although a precursor to Dresser’s Standard Diary, there was nothing about Denton and Wood’s product that suggested its future status as a household name, not even its title that simply stated Pocket Diary.13 Noting that it was published annually by Denton and Wood of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the commercial planner maintained close ties to its place of manufacture with sunrise and sunset data and tide tables for the city of Boston. Other than the calendar, its printed features included the usual array of postal

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rates, eclipses, and counting house almanac. Its physical appearance was typical of the antebellum generation of pocket diaries that favored utility over refi nement. Cardboard substituted for leather on the bindings. Cheap blue paper stood in for a thicker, higher quality stock on the inside. Its utilitarian design, for these users, seemed to add to its appeal. Soldiers, or travelers, did not have to treat this diary with any particular reverence. It was designed to be treated shabbily, roughly, to withstand the abuse of enlistment or a rugged journey west. The fact that Civil War soldiers were writing in a product more evocative of the past than the future did not seem to matter. What mattered was that the Civil War gave them reason to write. Even though its commonplace design never pretended to be anything but a mundane daily record, a catalog of one soldier’s march of days or a traveler’s progress of miles, the tiny volume underscored the value of that individual’s experience. It signaled that “even the most insignificant memoranda,” as New Yorker George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary, was worth recording. Rather than abandoning the habit once they returned home, many veterans kept writing and preferred to do it in a commercial diary. It was that opening, in part, that helped Dresser build an audience for his national brand. Dresser and a handful of other entrepreneurs capitalized on this diary-keeping surge to move their diaries beyond the city limits into the countryside and into the West. With the help of these unassuming, mass-produced products with brand names like the Standard Diary, the American Diary, and the National Diary, diary keeping in the late nineteenth century became a national pursuit. *

*

*

Of course, it would be oversimplifying matters to credit the Civil War and the westward migration alone for the postbellum rise in diary sales. Even before the Civil War, America was becoming more urban, more industrial, more connected by railway and telegraph. Diary publishers, like other manufacturers, welcomed these social, economic, and technological developments in the postwar years. In fact, the success of the Standard Diary mirrored the trajectory of other brand-named goods like Ivory soap and Crisco that made their way into households with the help of new techniques of marketing and distribution.14 Without the tools attendant with the creation of a mass consumer culture, such as branding

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and the elimination of the wholesaler, Dresser would never have been able to take his pocket diary national. However, rather than simply enjoying the fruits of these changes, Dresser and his counterparts had to remake the diary for this new age. It could benefit from the new technologies and economies of scale but had to be consistent with the needs and desires of a broader audience of users. Now they could give customers a choice. There wasn’t just one diary to choose from; there were hundreds. What better way to express oneself than to choose a diary that reflected who you were. Your book of days could be frilly and fancy; another could be plain and simple; yet all were convenient and ordered. Dresser and his contemporaries had to develop a product that would respond to the kinds of diary-keeping demands that emerged in the Civil War and western experiences. It must be portable, flexible, affordable, yet refi ned. It would democratize the kind of record keeping to which the urbane New York diarist George Templeton Strong aspired while providing a cheap commercial answer to the humble pamphlets that many westerners were relegated to. Thanks to technology and a bit of imagination, Dresser created a product that joined the two major themes of its predecessors: gentility and democracy. In the late eighteenth century, Robert Aitken had introduced an innovation that was a luxurious answer to the lowly almanac, a daily diary ornately bound for his elite clientele. By the time Jackson came to office, printers had transformed that stationery experiment into a plain, democratic business accessory. Dresser built on these foundations with his cheap, mass-produced fi nery: a fabricated form of refi nement.15 It was a stroke that broadened the audience beyond anything Aitken had even considered. In a brief entry on the history of Dresser’s Cambridgeport (eventually Standard) Diary Company in The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six, an anonymous contributor made the Standard Diary sound as commonplace as the almanac once was: “In the pockets of rich and of poor in the cities, or of farmers in the fields, in counting-rooms, stores, and shops, in houses of luxury or in modest homes all over America, these Cambridge-made diaries are to be found.”16 While the writer may have exaggerated the Standard Diary’s reach, his statement reflected Dresser’s bold aspiration to create a diary for everyone. Stationers, like other manufacturers, suffered in a postwar economy

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shaken by periodic convulsions in a boom-and-bust cycle that drove many businesses under. Many fi rms struggled at the end of the Civil War, and some diary manufacturers did not survive. Indeed, the diary business mirrored trends in other manufacturing industries. Those businesses that managed to weather the economic downturns consolidated, incorporated, opened colossal factories, and employed large workforces.17 Many titles including Marsh’s Pocket Diary, Clayton’s Diary, and Brown’s Almanack faded into history. Only a handful of manufacturers survived to enjoy the swell in diary sales after the Civil War. They improved distribution by setting up wholesale accounts with book or stationery stores across the country and advertised through trade papers such as the American Stationer. Dresser and his Standard Diary Company were proof of the industry’s success. Before the Civil War, no businessman could hope to survive by manufacturing diaries alone. Dresser did and became a millionaire in the process. But before they could claim their millions, Dresser and his competitors had to remake the daily diary for a new era. They splashed the title pages with color. They experimented with new names. They peppered the calendar pages with illustrations. Not simply a matter of style, producers initiated many of these updates to build a brand image that might attract a national audience. More than just a facelift, they went even further addressing the product’s substance in hopes of making the content more modern and appealing to a new generation of customers. They introduced features such as a primer on the metric system and a section to record the exchange of letters and social visits. They told customers how to convert the hours listed in the sunrise/sunset tables into standard time. Dresser did not wait long before giving both the pocket diary and the Cambridgeport fi rm a makeover. In 1867, he bought out Eben Denton’s share of the business.18 By 1872, the title page of Denton’s old pocket diary had a new look. For the fi rst time color appeared on a diary title page, an innovation that would have been impossible without advances in printing technology. Standing out on a red background and encircled by a bold, red border was the diary’s new symbol: A wheel displaying the twelve signs of the zodiac along its spokes with the diary’s year printed in the middle. For his diary of the future, Dresser chose a vestige of its almanac past, thinking perhaps that it might appeal to customers’ nostalgia. Constructed as a wheel, Dresser’s choice of symbol must have reminded users of time’s cyclical nature. Each year, rest assured, these

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Figure 4.2. A sales receipt from the Standard Diary Company with the fi rm’s zodiac logo displayed prominently in the upper left corner. Author’s collection.

same twelve signs would come again in exact order and bring with them the same alignment in the sky. But there is something about the symbol that feels more modern, more of the era than one might initially have thought. After all, Dresser chose a wheel for his astrological symbol, not the traditional “Man of Signs” that suggested man was governed by celestial forces. Dresser’s wheel looked more like a “wheel of fortune” whose luck was bestowed on individuals more arbitrarily, less contingent upon God or other supernatural aspects. Dresser removed the mysticism from the “Signs” and made it a secular symbol—his trademark. In 1874, with the zodiac wheel on his title page, he renamed this new diary the Standard Diary and copyrighted both the symbol and the title under the name the Cambridgeport Diary Company.19 In choosing its new title, Dresser followed the lead of other stationers who had begun experimenting with new names as a branding technique. For instance, the New York blank book fi rm of Kiggins and Kellogg, in line with other antebellum diary manufacturers, had initially called its diary the Daily Pocket Diary . . . for the use of Private Families and Persons of Business Containing a Banking Table, Counting Almanac, & a Blank Space for Memorandums for Every Day in the Year. Soon after

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the Civil War, however, the fi rm simplified its title and renamed it the Excelsior Diary.20 Meaning higher or ever upward, the term excelsior suggested that a product was of the best quality and had no equal. It became a common nineteenth-century trademark distinguishing mattresses, soaps, diaries, and many other goods. 21 Dresser chose Standard for his title since the term was often used to denote a book that was an authority on a subject or an “exemplar of excellence.”22 Kiggins and Kellogg, later Kiggins and Tooker, lived up to its “excelsior” name by offering the most varieties of a single diary in the late nineteenth-century marketplace. In an advertisement in an 1874 issue of the American Stationer, Kiggins, Tooker, and Company offered “250 Varieties of Diaries Annually, On Beautiful Rose-Tinted Paper,” particularly appealing to its female clientele. Three years later the firm upped that number to three hundred. In an 1886 directory of stationery staples called The Purchaser, only two companies were listed under the entry for “Diaries”: the Cambridgeport Diary Company and Kiggins, Tooker, and Company.23 Both companies had succeeded in establishing a best-selling brand, if not quite a monopoly. Branding proved to be one of the most essential innovations Dresser and his contemporaries employed. It was, after all, one of the most significant business trends to emerge after the Civil War. 24 Retailers and manufacturers alike forged new marketing practices to distinguish their products from the avalanche of consumer goods that flooded the marketplace. Patent medicine men were among the fi rst to realize the marketing value of trademarks, but manufacturers like Dresser were not far behind. Dresser managed to register his diary name and symbol just before America’s fi rst trademark law was declared unconstitutional in 1879. The law was short-lived, but it clued producers in on a trademark’s virtues and made branding a key part of their business strategy. 25 Thus other brands soon followed, most notably the American Diary and the National Diary, both manufactured by Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, of Hartford, Connecticut, not coincidentally the publisher of another standard—G. H. Merriam’s Webster’s Dictionary. 26 Not all attempts at branding were successful, however. Hoping a new technology might encourage sales, one fi rm in 1869 introduced its Patent Self-Closing Diary. No special fasteners were needed to keep this diary closed, for a stiffened board was built into the cover that allowed the owner to snap it shut after use. Such innovations were precursors to book locks, which were still in development and not yet small enough for

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a pocket book. But by 1873 the company abandoned the newfangled title after it failed to entice customers. Diarists who had once purchased a Patent Self-Closing Diary moved on to other, more successful brands such as the Standard Diary. 27 Brand names such as the Standard Diary did more than help someone like Dresser beat out his competition. They helped the diary go national. Diaries were no longer named after popular booksellers like John Marsh of Boston or E. B. Clayton of New York, names that would mean nothing to people beyond the city’s limits. Instead, diary titles might now appeal to anyone living anywhere, regardless of status or location. It was a perspective that reflected the continental visions of the hundreds of travelers and Civil War veterans who yearned for a more universal form. That message seems especially obvious in such titles as the American Diary and the National Diary. Title pages no longer listed the place of publication. Instead, Dresser and others printed a line heard often in the stationery business in the late nineteenth century: “Published for the Trade.”28 It meant that wherever you lived you could walk into a stationery shop or bookstore and fi nd that brand of diary sitting on the shelf. Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, publishers replaced the phrase “Published for the Trade” with “For Sale by All Stationers.”29 Thus as diary manufacturers conveyed, there was no limit to their product’s reach. Nevertheless, before producers could fulfi ll their aspiration of creating a national market, they had to make the diary’s content more inclusive. The printed tables had always betrayed the pocket diary’s eastern bias. Few customers outside New England likely cared about the times of high and low tide in Boston. Extending the daily planner’s reach meant answering the needs of Americans living west of the Mississippi, or at least the Hudson. Manufacturers responded by adding the sunrise/ sunset data and tide tables for San Francisco and other western cities. 30 Dresser introduced a new kind of table in his Standard Diaries that used different measures to comprehend the distance from New York to different cities in the United States. The fi rst column listed the mileage, the second the length of travel by train in hours and minutes, and the third the difference in local time between the two locales. One might expect to see cities such as Chicago or Buffalo, New York, but Dresser also included more far-flung destinations such as Salt Lake City and San Francisco. 31 In an 1880 National Diary, publisher Case, Lockwood, Brainard embellished the calendar section with engravings of selected national scenes. You might expect depictions of “Cape May” and a “Westchester

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Farm,” but the Hartford publisher also wisely included views of “Mining in Nevada,” “Yosemite Valley,” “Cape Hatteras,” “Frozen Lake Colorado,” and “Lumbering in Michigan.”32 These illustrations improved the appearance of the commercial diary as they helped achieve a broader mission of expanding its audience into the hinterlands. Even though publishers were careful to retain popular features such as interest tables and postage rates, they went to great lengths to bring the diary into the modern age. An 1881 Standard Diary, for instance, devoted two full pages to “The Metric System,” including an abridged “Metric Table” for easy reference. In November 1883, the nation’s railroads adopted a system of Standard Time that divided the country into four regional time zones. By 1885, Dresser made sure that his customers had the instructions they needed to convert the sunrise and sunset tables from local mean time to the “New Standard Time.” That might not have been enough of a move forward for some owners who, such as former Lowell mill girl Susan Brown, pasted newspaper clippings explaining “The New Standard Time” on the endleaves of their commercial diaries. By 1890, Case, Lockwood, and Brainard took the next logical step and substituted Standard Time in the American Diary’s list of moon’s phases and provided a chart listing the “High Water, [for] San Francisco” for an entire year in “Pacific Standard Time.”33 Intended to sell more diaries, such features also spoke to assumptions on the part of manufacturers that the daily planner might turn customers’ eyes toward the future. Not only a matter of adding substance, diary companies were just as alert to the symbolic power of illustrations in conveying an outlook toward modern times. For Case, Lockwood, and Brainard that commitment translated into offering romantic scenes of American progress in the pages of the American and National Diaries. In particular, the title page of the 1885 American Diary depicted a typical illustration of the evolution of American enterprise. Resting on top of iconic symbols of American abundance such as sprigs of wheat and a scythe, a canvas displayed the steps in America’s march toward its economic future: a farmer and a team of horses hoeing a field, a mill powered by the current of a river, a train running on a bridge constructed over that river, and in the distance a huge factory with smoke billowing from its stacks. 34 The message conveyed to customers was that American progress was not only natural but welcome, a fulfi llment of the country’s destiny. None of these improvements would have been possible without technology. Lithography allowed manufacturers to refi ne the appearance

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of the pocket diary without a dramatic increase in price, and the steam press meant they could produce thousands more than their antebellum predecessors. Kiggins and Tooker could never have hoped to offer three hundred varieties to its customers without these advances. But it was much more than that. The industry’s trade papers demonstrated how instrumental technology was in updating the commercial product to appeal to a new generation. Each issue of the American Stationer reserved a section to announce new “Patents Relating to Stationery,” everything from inkstands to game boards. Susan Forbes of Boston bought a diary in 1873 that featured a “Patent Erasible Surface” on its endpaper so that diarists could “Use a soft pencil, and erase with moisture” to renew the page for fresh notes or quick calculations. 35 An August 1875 issue of the American Stationer, for instance, announced a patent for “Locks for Pocket Books” registered by F. Kinn of New York. It was described as follows: “The metallic tongue of the closing flap is constructed with ears or projections, and seated in a recessed base piece to the body of the book, having notches to receive its ears, and is held therein by a pivoted lever clamp impinging upon its ears.”36 As monumental as this patent for a book lock might seem, other closures prevailed through the end of the nineteenth century, including the traditional “tuck” closure that consisted of a flap that tucked into a band on the book’s cover, and an elastic band secured at the back by a metal fastener. 37 The metallic lock, very heavy and bulky, was expensive to produce and would not be paired with a pocket diary with any regularity until the twentieth century. But regardless of the fastener, pick up any printed diary produced in the late nineteenth century and the word “patented” will appear somewhere on the cover or in between, yet another component of publishers’ branding strategy. Technology drove the design of these retail items, and manufacturers, welcome beneficiaries of such inventions, boasted the fact whenever they had the opportunity. With the help of such technological innovations, producers succeeded in transforming the utilitarian pocket diaries of the antebellum period into a Gilded Age item of affordable luxury. The American Stationer encouraged its industry leaders to make room for such indulgences in their stock rooms because “Americans, as a people, are lavish in expenditure, and are always ready to appreciate what is excellent, if it is properly presented.”38 Diary companies responded by decorating the daily planner’s pages with intricate engravings and color graphics; creating compartments—labeled in gilt lettering—for holding

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calling cards, rail tickets, and postage; adding a Faber pencil in its own leather slot in the crease of the “tuck” flap; and encasing it all in fabric so rich looking it rivaled the appearance of a lady’s ornate gown. 39 This was just the sort of commercial diary that would appeal to Mary Grosvenor Salisbury, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who walked downtown to Millers bookstore on New Year’s Day 1863 with her “dogs Guy and Don keeping [her] company.” When she arrived, Salisbury bought the fi rst volume of Godey’s, an autograph book for her son Stephen, and a diary for the new year.40 Apparently a lady who kept up on fashion, Salisbury would surely have cared what her diary looked like. However, these postbellum stationers departed from Aitken’s eighteenth- century precedent by making it more affordable. In Dresser’s hands, the printed diary became both lavish and commonplace, a branded pseudo-luxury. Price, therefore, was a factor for even the most well to do. For instance, John Gladding, of Philadelphia, marketed his “Diaries for 1875,” over “One Hundred and Fifteen Styles,” as the “Cheapest in the Market.” Once again, thanks to technology, publishers produced a diary that may have looked expensive but was not. Prices remained stable from the end of the Civil War to the opening of the new century. Diaries could cost as little as 25 cents—not much more than an almanac—to upwards of $1.75, depending on how elaborate a style one wanted. In an 1874 ad for the Concise Diary, publishers noted that the diaries could be sold “by themselves or in an appropriate case of Russia or morocco, lined with calf, with compartments for letters, cards, railway tickets, and postage stamps. The gold-printing of the diaries is really elegant.”41 In 1871, Susan Brown purchased a plain pocket diary with a tuck closure and a page-a-day section at Whitney and Adam’s store in Springfield, Massachusetts, for 75 cents. Thomas H. Savery routinely recorded how much he paid for his, and often his wife’s, diaries in the accounts section of his annual pocket diary. In 1865, he bought a diary for himself for 85 cents and a frillier one for his wife for $1.75. Eventually, both husband and wife were spending about the same on their diaries: $1.50 each year. That price remained the same for the Wilmington couple up through the 1880s, even though publishers were adding features all the time. By way of comparison, in January 1876 Savery spent $4 a day to board at the Hotel Metropolitan in Washington, DC, and paid $4.50 for a train ticket back to Philadelphia. As pricey as some diaries got, in rural Litchfield County, Connecticut, Alvin Bartlett, a young farm boy, still managed to pick up an 1879 Standard Diary for only 25 cents.42 With

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such flexibility in pricing, producers made the pocket diary—a practical, yet genteel accoutrement—attainable for most Americans, for men as well as women. Aside from making it more affordable, producers had to insure that the product appealed to women as readily as men. The Standard Diary and its cousins incorporated features to satisfy feminine and masculine tastes equally well. Stationers added romantic engravings, fi ne morocco bindings, and colorful title pages. Susan Brown admitted on the endleaf of one of her diaries that she stole (though she might prefer the word “borrowed”) that year’s diary from her husband, Alexander, who had not used it.43 In some respects, these postbellum diaries resembled the dainty Ladies’ Pocket Diary of the 1830s. Dresser added features to the Standard Diary over the years that served women more directly than men, such as printed entries on “Antidotes for poison” and “Help! In Case of Accidents,” items we might see today magneted to the fridge.44 And while accounting may have at one time been the daily planner’s primary function, the addition of separate sections for “Addresses” and “Calls and Letters Received and Answered” meant that the diary could serve a more social purpose.45 Of course, women were not the only ones making social calls and writing letters, but they must have prized these features as a useful tool for maintaining their social obligations. Indeed, an advertisement for the “Standard” line of diaries in 1894 noted that the diaries could be had in “ladies’ sizes” that contained, in addition to all its other handy features, “calls and letters received and answered” added expressly for their female buyers.46 On August 29, 1873, the Walnut Valley Times of Eldorado, Kansas, published a small ad in its personals section that read: FOUND. We have in our possession an Excelsior Diary belonging to A. W. Stubbs of the Kaw Agency, Indian Territory. The book contains some valuable papers. The daily record shows that Mr. Stubbs was on his way north from Eldorado on Saturday, the 23rd day of August, and that he took dinner at Sycamore Springs on that day. Mr. M. Randall, of this county, left the above described diary in our possession. The owner can have it if he will only let us know where he is.47

While we may never know whether Mr. Stubbs was reunited with his Excelsior Diary, the editors of that small Kansas weekly did affi rm how well a handful of eastern publishers fulfi lled their national objective. They in-

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deed had a wide reach. Two years later, in 1875, Kiggins and Tooker had to enlarge the capacity of their New York store “by building the shelving clear to the ceiling” because of increased demand for its diaries. Demand had increased so fast that they had to push hard “even in these dull times, to manufacture fast enough to keep any stock on hand.”48 What Robert Aitken had trouble selling a century before in a bustling prerevolutionary Philadelphia was now flying off store shelves. The Standard Diary and its competitors had become so much a part of the cultural landscape by the late nineteenth century that it was probably difficult for many Americans to imagine life before the daily planner. Montgomery Ward’s promotion in its 1895 catalog was just one example. The daily organizer seemed to be everywhere. In children’s magazines, ladies’ fashion periodicals, and stationers’ trade catalogs. Among the premiums offered in a fall 1878 issue of the Youth’s Companion was a copy of Webster’s Primary Dictionary, a “Harvard Book Rack,” and Pocket Diary for 1879. All one had to do was supply the children’s magazine with one new subscriber and pay for “Postage and Packing.” Later the same periodical offered copies of the Standard Diary at half price to promote a “Standard-Leather Substitute” manufactured by L. C. Chase and Company of Boston.49 Even Harper’s Bazaar devoted a chunk of editorial space in a summer 1888 edition to enumerate the benefits of the product. Although the brief essay had no title, it might have been dubbed “Ode to the Pocket Diary,” the praise was that effusive. According to the anonymous author, “There are not many conveniences of the same size to be had, and of equal amount of usefulness, with the pocket diary.” After spending a paragraph listing its many features, including “postage laws,” “values of the world’s coins,” and “the standard time,” the author explained that its exhaustive “compendium of the necessary knowledge for daily use” is “the least of its virtues.” Its “fi ne-lined pages for the record of every day” contains a “complete rescript of the events of one’s external life” so that with “not five minutes’ work a day” a collection of “its volumes can be made exceedingly useful and interesting to those who have them.” Not simply a reference aid, “it is a real comfort” and may in time become a “confidential friend and servant.” It’s no wonder a later issue of Modern Retailing encouraged stationery shops to order a twenty-four-inchhigh “lithographed display piece” advertising next season’s Standard Diaries. In the foreground a woman sits with chin in hand contemplating the question that appears just above her stating “Can You Remember?”

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With a Standard Diary opened behind her, the answer was obvious: Yes, as long as you had a Standard Diary at your fi ngertips. Placed strategically alongside any cash register, the display “will surely attract attention” and promote another brisk season of diary sales. 50 Such constant praise and coordinated promotion ushered in new customers both young and old, in bustling cities as well as sleepy country towns. No longer as exclusive as it was in Aitken’s day, the pocket diary was newly ubiquitous and had become second nature for anyone looking for a suitable daily record. But the Standard Diary, while beholding to predecessors like Robert Aitken and John Marsh for providing a basic format, departed from earlier incarnations and brought the daily planner into the modern age. It was not simply a question of design, although diary publishers of that era, including the Excelsior Diary and the Standard Diary, did take advantage of new printing techniques to give their products slick makeovers. The departure from the past had as much to do with an attitude, an inclusiveness and desire to bring customers into modernity. That meant adding features that brought users in line with modern timekeeping on “The Standard Time” and new systems of weights and measures with tables devoted to “The Metric System.” It also meant encouraging them to visualize a broader America in calendar scenes from Cape Hatteras to Yosemite Valley. Finally, the naming trends that hatched such titles as the American Diary and the Standard Diary were not merely branding ploys geared toward greater sales. Although the publishers themselves may not have realized the impact, the modern brand names told customers that they were one diarist among many, that their daily habit connected them to an audience who performed the same, useful exercise each and every day. Rather than being a diarist locked away in secret alone in one’s room, many customers welcomed the kinds of virtual connections a National Diary offered. But just because these daily planners pointed toward the future did not mean everyone went along. The Standard Diary might lead, but customers did not always follow. *

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The Standard Diary may have had the most influence on those who were completely new to diary keeping, customers like Alvin Bartlett. Alvin S. Bartlett, known throughout his life simply as “Al,” was born on July 24, 1864, in East Canaan, Connecticut, an insular New England commu-

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nity bordering Massachusetts to its north and New York to its west. He had no memory of the Civil War, except what his parents, aunts and uncles, or veterans may have told him. Bartlett, then, was a child of a new age, and his fi rst diary attests to that fact. It was an 1879 Standard Diary and contained all the printed matter customers had come to expect of the era’s most popular daily organizer including a “Distance, Time, and Difference of Time” table, “Weights and Measures,” interest tables, and monthly calendar pages. Its diary pages were divided into three days apiece, giving Bartlett roughly ten lines to sum up a day’s events. Initially, Bartlett needed fewer than two. It took some time for the Standard Diary to wield its influence and turn Bartlett, then just fourteen years old, into a more habitual recorder. As a matter of fact, Bartlett did not even attempt to fi ll in every blank of the fi rst few months of his Standard Diary. It was not until the end of March that Bartlett came around to answering for every day, even if simply to record “went to school.” Instead, Bartlett used those opening pages to keep track of the goods he had sent away for, recording the exact date he “sent for a catalogue,” “got some samples,” or “got a pack of cromo cards.” In fact, Bartlett’s inaugural entry was nothing more than two addresses scribbled under the date “Wednesday, January 1, 1879.” Two companies, one in New York City the other in Nassau, New York, probably responsible for delivering a catalog or two to Bartlett’s rural doorstep. Judging from these initial entries, Bartlett was a mail-order fanatic. 51 Bartlett’s Standard Diaries helped Bartlett make the leap from local customer to national consumer. It was a shift that many Americans would experience in the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century as willing “participants in a national market composed of masses of people associating with big, centrally organized, national-level companies.”52 Dresser’s Standard Diary fi rm was among those companies. While many rural customers across America relied on Montgomery Ward to introduce them to the concept of mail order, by the time Bartlett had encountered the now legendary mail-order house he was already a convert. But it wasn’t just the catalog that brought the world to customers like Bartlett. Their daily planners performed the same feat by making the world appear smaller thanks to producers like Edwin Dresser who had infused the modest handbook with a national character that made even far-off destinations feel closer to home. A new breed of consumer, Bartlett enlisted his daily planner to

Figure 4.3. It took Alvin Bartlett some months before developing a diary habit, evident from his inaugural entry in his 1879 Standard Diary that lists addresses for two mail-order fi rms. Author’s collection.

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manage his buying life no matter where it transported him. At fi rst Bartlett scribbled the addresses of city fi rms in his diary pages and later on endleaves or in memoranda pages, anywhere he could fi nd the space. They could be as close as Boston or New York, or as far afield as Chicago or Cincinnati. To Bartlett it was all the same. Bartlett paid “6 ct” for a “64 page Catalogue” from “R. S. Simpson 132 Nassau St. NY” or ordered “one pack of cromo cards and 32 pages illistrated for 10 cts” from the “Peoples Paper” or “A H Miller Boston Mass.”53 At the back of his 1888 American Diary, Bartlett wrote down a list of pamphlets, priced at 30 cents apiece, on “How to grow mellons . . . onions . . . [and] root crops for stock” from a company in Philadelphia called W. Atlee Burpee, which would become the Burpee Seed Company. In 1881, Bartlett copied the address for a “John C. Haynes & Co.” at “33 Court Street” in Boston and noted in the “Memo” section of his Standard Diary that he could “Send for illustrated Catalogue free.” The Haynes name is renowned among today’s instrument collectors for its “Bay State Banjos” but also offered a full line of songbooks and other musical instruments from its retail store on Court Street in Boston. In the spring of 1886, Bartlett noted in his diary that he “Subscribed for Chicago Weekley.” That last clue may account for all of the Chicago fi rms that began replacing the addresses in Boston and New York, most notably the address that appeared in the “Memo” section of Bartlett’s 1889 diary for “Montgomery Ward & Co. 111 & 114 Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill.” Bartlett added to the entry: “Send 10c Buyer’s Guide.”54 Not every customer was like Alvin Bartlett, willing to embrace the diary’s modern bent. Plenty of others, especially those born before the Civil War, preferred to treat their daily planners as their forebears might have: as account books, tools of self-improvement, and calendars. A newfangled diary did not necessarily produce a new kind of diarist. What made the Standard Diary so popular was its ability to accommodate past practice as well as move users toward the future. Old habits paired comfortably with the updated brands, which to an untrained eye looked identical to the commercial diaries of previous generations. That goes for the entries as well. Some might have difficulty seeing anything new in the diary’s spaces. They looked a lot like the diaries of their parents and grandparents: an endless register of life’s daily trivia. Of working and baking and sewing and visiting, one day after the next and the next. Nevertheless, for many customers new features did encourage new habits and new attitudes. Those benefits could be virtual, as in the con-

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nections a national diary promised, or actual, as in the insertion of Standard Time tables or spaces reserved for weather data. The changes are more obvious in some diaries than others. It is not difficult, for instance, to see the difference in Bartlett’s diary. His immersion in the emerging mass consumer culture is evident on every page. Bartlett was also preoccupied with another pocket novelty: his watch. While Bartlett’s watch ownership did not seem to affect great change in his attitude toward time (for obvious reasons that I’ll explain shortly), other diarists betrayed a new urgency toward timekeeping and wove clock time into the fabric of their daily entries wherever they could. The Standard Diary may not have single-handedly turned diarists into mass consumers or devotees of mechanical time, it helped facilitate such moves into modernity by providing customers with a means to exercise and inculcate new habits toward commerce and time. The beauty of the Standard Diary was in its versatility: it could be all things to all people. It was that, and not just its newness, that made an unassuming stationery staple into a modern-day classic. The product’s versatility was reflected in the diversity of its customers. They lived in cities, in towns, or along unnamed country roads in the East, the West, and the Midwest. As many men as women, they were statesmen, socialites, businessmen, domestics, dairy farmers, teachers, and housewives. Some came from renowned families such as historian and civic leader Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson of President John and older brother of Henry, who used a Standard Diary each year from 1872 until his death in 1915. Some were married couples such as Thomas H. and Sallie Pim Savery of Wilmington, Delaware. A civil engineer, Thomas used his diaries for business and littered its pages with intricate drawings of pulleys and other mechanical contraptions he designed for his papermaking company. At the end of each year, Savery picked up a new diary for himself and one for his wife, whose entries tended more toward family and household matters. 55 Some Standard diarists consisted of entire families such as the Bemises of East Burke, Vermont, who among five family members and three generations stuck to one brand: the Standard Diary. Isaac Bemis bought his wife Kate’s for Christmas, while children Freddie and Carrie relied on their Aunt Emma to supply them with a new diary at the beginning of each year. Kate’s father, D. W. Cushing, lived down the road from the Bemis farm and routinely bought his own. Lizzie Goodenough was a domestic in Brattleboro, Vermont, and despite her crushing duties

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as servant and later housewife she managed to maintain a daily habit, choosing a brand in 1875 that her daughter would take up a quarter century later in 1901. 56 *

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Bartlett began keeping a diary in 1879 at the age of fourteen and may have kept a diary all his life. Only nine of Bartlett’s volumes, spanning a decade to 1890, have survived: six are Standard Diaries, two are American Diaries, and one is the National Diary. They document Bartlett’s ascent into manhood along with the responsibilities and occasional joys that came with it. The Bartlett farm stood atop a small rise in East Canaan, Connecticut, and offered a commanding view of the valley below and the ridges that ringed it. Although pocketed with lush and fertile farmland, East Canaan was also an industrial town and boasted an old ironworks and a limestone quarry that still operates today. By the 1870s, it was Irish immigrants, not the older East Canaan families, who worked the “furnace,” as the ironworks was called, leaving the rest of the community to its primary business of growing. For the Bartletts, that growing included tobacco, rye, oats, corn, hay, with some dairying on the side. Part of a tight-knit community, Bartlett and his younger brother might help bring in some crops over at their neighbor’s, the Pecks or the Moseses, just as young William Moses might do the same for them. 57 No doubt many in East Canaan knew one another by name and much of one another’s business besides. Jane Fiske of Webster, New Hampshire, is the perfect foil for Bartlett and underscores just how adaptable the commercial product could be. Fiske was of an earlier generation than Bartlett, and though she had settled in rural New Hampshire following her marriage in 1872, she was much more worldly than the Connecticut teenager, having worked as a mill hand in Lowell and spent several years teaching throughout the South for the Freedman’s Bureau. Fiske may have started her diary habit as early as Bartlett, but the fi rst that survives dates from 1871, when she was thirty-six. Extending over forty years of her adult life, Fiske’s record is lengthy and impressive in its regularity. There exist thirty-four diaries in all, spanning from 1871 to 1910 when Fiske’s failing eyesight forced her to give up her daily habit. What we can conclude from the diaries Fiske left behind is that in the years following the Civil War, as she

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embarked on middle age and motherhood, she became as much a Standard Diary disciple as did Bartlett and countless other late nineteenthcentury diarists. 58 Bartlett and Fiske seemed to be at opposite ends of the pendulum in their relation to commerce. Bartlett favored ready-to-wear clothing; Fiske made her own. Bartlett was a spender; Fiske more devoted to thrift. Bartlett’s entries betray an avid consumer, whereas Fiske appeared focused on producing, using her memo pages to catalog the butter and eggs sent to market from her husband’s dairy farm. Bartlett’s diaries were more evocative of the future and Fiske’s the past. The Standard Diary easily accommodated both. For Bartlett, that meant supplying him with a “Cash Accounts” section to record purchases as varied as “Overalls,” “Peppermints,” and “Fire Crackers.”59 The accounting grew more elaborate as he became more practiced and grew into a man, presumably having more cash in his pocket to spend on things. For Fiske, though she ignored the “Cash Accounts” section in favor of a larger account ledger, her Standard Diaries supplied sufficient space to document the hours clocked by day laborers on her modest farm.60 Perusing the accounts pages of his 1879 Standard Diary, Bartlett’s spending appeared typical of a rural teenager with countless pennies shelled out for doughnuts, candy, popcorn, peanuts, and other daily treats. There are also many entries related to supporting his various musical interests, such as the nickel spent on a “Fiddle bridge” or the 3 cents toward a guitar string. On January 3, 1881, Bartlett wrote in his diary: “Clear. Went to school. Saw E. Briggs about takeing lessons.” Violin lessons, that is, for which he was in constant need of new strings and “prompting books.” On December 6 of that same year, 1881, Bartlett recorded in the diary’s “Cash Account” section spending 12 cents on a “Song Book,” which could have come from Haynes, the banjo makers.61 What appeared more unusual, for a boy of his age and limited means, was all the money Bartlett spent on postage. Whether Bartlett noted the cash spent “mailing a letter,” buying “stamps,” or sending for a “Prise Package,” the expenses added up to a hefty sum over the course of a given month. He routinely ordered catalogs and garden seeds from Peter Henderson’s or a lesson books from C. H. Ditson’s. Bartlett likely found the addresses of such fi rms in the newsprint pages of the “New York Herald,” a copy of which he picked up one spring day in 1879, or the weekly issue of the Connecticut Western News, a four-page broad-

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sheet published out of a small news office since 1871 in nearby North Canaan.62 Bartlett’s 1879 daily planner, which he bought for “25 cents” according to his accounts section, helped him stay organized, arranging and ordering all those transactions that delivered shiny new postcards, catalogs, song books, and other goods to his doorstep. Born in 1834, Fiske was old enough to be Bartlett’s mother, and that may explain why her diaries reveal a different kind of sensibility toward the market than Bartlett’s. Fiske was not a wide-eyed youth eager to pursue what might come to her via the US mail. Already thirty-six when her record opened in 1871, she had fended for herself for many years and remained unmarried. In January 1871, Fiske, a native of Hanson, Massachusetts, a small community twenty-five miles southeast of Boston, was in Washington, DC. She taught freed slaves how to read and write and negotiate a new world full of unfamiliar obstacles like fi nding work and clothing for their families.63 Fiske headed south several years before and spent time in Hilton Head, Port Royal, and Sumter, South Carolina, and had been exposed to all sorts of misfortune for which even her own difficult life so far had not prepared her.64 After visiting the army “barracks” where many displaced slaves congregated when the war and their bondage had ceased, Fiske recorded on a February diary page in 1871 making “several calls” on her down-and-out brethren and witnessing “much sin and misery.”65 Long before her sojourn to the war-ravaged South, Fiske, like Susan Brown, had been a Lowell mill girl, one of hundreds of New England farm girls indoctrinated early to the stark realities of the industrial revolution in the textile factories clustered, from the 1830s to ’50s, at Lowell, Massachusetts. As young as ten but most between sixteen and twentyfive, the mill girls were forced to live according to the rules of an often grueling, clock-regulated twelve-hour workday. Even so, Fiske had fond memories of Lowell (28 March 1871: “Calls from Col Fletcher & Mrs. William Fletcher nee Harriet Goodwin. Very pleasant chat of Lowell times.”) and visited the industrial town in the summer of 1871 to catch up with old friends and acquaintances.66 Perhaps a vestige of her “Lowell times,” there was a streak of thrift evident in Fiske’s diaries that may have been influenced by her past reliance on wage work as much as her compassion for the plight of her pupils. In Washington, she might record doing a “little shopping” here and there, but tended to buy fabric or other materials, such as “bonnet trim-

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mings,” and complete the fi nished product herself. Yet Fiske enlisted whatever modern conveniences might be available to make a task more manageable, as in the time she “Borrowed Mrs. Babe’s [sewing] machine & made my percale dress.” Even after her marriage in 1872, Fiske continued to piece together the family’s clothing herself, eschewing the kind of ready-to-wear that Bartlett purchased as a matter of course. The most obvious indication that Fiske’s Standard Diaries were not a partner in her consumption was the fact that she, unlike Bartlett, did not use the “Cash Accounts” section for her expenses. Fiske had a separate volume for that purpose since she indicated in an entry dated August 28, 1873, that she “Spent the rest of the day making accounts.”67 In 1880, when “Willie” was four and beginning to talk and reason on his own, Fiske devoted the “Cash Account” pages in that year’s Standard Diary to the clever things that escaped from his little mouth. Fiske transcribed one particularly memorable exchange with her son as follows: “‘I wish I had another mama.’ ‘Why, what do you want another mama for?’ ‘Cas I like ‘em.’” And another: “[Willie] was repeating a little ditty. Pat a cake. After saying it several times—[Willie said] Now I’ll see if I can say it with my eyes shut.” For a time, it was as if “Willie” and his mother shared her diaries, Fiske fi lling up the diary pages and the “Call and Letters” section and Willie carving out the unclaimed spaces for drawings, penmanship practice, and random declarations such as the one that appeared on an endleaf in her 1887 Standard Diary that read “Papa bought it for mamma Jan 1 1887.”68 Fiske’s diaries were not her own; they were a family endeavor. But Fiske’s diaries, while not as chock-full of spending and getting as Bartlett’s, did connect her to the market in a more traditional sense: as a producer. Fiske often set aside space in her daily entries, usually at the bottom of the printed page or in the margins, to tally the produce on the Fiske farm and what might be on its way to market. In April 1873, Fiske jotted at the bottom of one day’s entry: “106 lbs of butter churned last week.” And a few days later: “F. [short for “Fuller,” Fiske’s husband] went to Concord with butter & eggs—46 doz.” In the summer of 1873 and 75, Fiske’s focus was on hay, as she kept tabs on the loads a half-dozen day laborers, or “haymakers” as she called them, were able to bring in from the fields. She declared one day, July 1, a particularly “Good hay-day” and noted that “8 loads” were gathered, bringing their total so far to twenty-one, which by the next week had climbed to

Figure 4.4. On an unused cash accounts page in her 1880 diary, Jane Fiske recorded the adorable observations of her four-year-old son “Willie.” Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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forty-nine.69 As her family farm’s chief tabulator, Fiske continued to keep account of its output with the assistance of her little, store-bought diaries throughout the late nineteenth century. Although it might be tempting, after this initial juxtaposition of Fiske’s and Bartlett’s diary keeping, to reverse the conventional wisdom that has cast women as the driving force behind mass consumption and men as throwbacks clinging to the remnants of a producer ethic, such a conclusion would be hasty. Bartlett, too, recorded in his diaries the products gathered from the farm, such as when his brother, Hiram, “went down [to the village] with cream,” or when Alvin “Sold some cider to a Canaan Irishman.” 70 And Fiske, do not forget, embraced a commercial diary over a homemade one every year for four decades. Rather, Bartlett’s emphasis on spending and getting and Fiske’s on producing illustrates just how adaptable the Standard Diary could be. It may have been generic, but diarists did not use it in “standard” ways. On the contrary, Bartlett and Fiske and others like them were always pushing at the printed margins and fi nding uses that its entrepreneurial creators might never have dreamed of. These adaptive or creative uses could be influenced by gender, age, education, socioeconomic background, or personal proclivities. Thus the daily planner’s appeal was different for everyone. Fiske’s reasons for cherishing her annual page-a-day may not have been the same as Bartlett’s. Each mapped his or her own way through its pages. And yet Fiske’s experience, after her marriage, was brought into alignment with Bartlett’s in a significant way. Although for different reasons, Fiske and Bartlett felt isolated and allowed their diaries to play witness to their search for a larger community. For Bartlett, that translated into ordering catalogs and goods that brought the outside world home to him. For Fiske, it meant recording those moments when her husband hand delivered the books that would get her through her lengthy confi nements. As each recorded these bright spots, it reminded them that, although they may have written in private, Fiske and Bartlett were not alone. In October 1872, Fiske married Fuller Fiske, whom she met down South during his service as a civilian war nurse, and moved to his remote farm in Webster, New Hampshire, far from the bustling life she had led before.71 Judging from the occasional complaints sprinkled in her Standard Diary, it was a jarring transition. She wrote of her “weary, weary living” and the fact that there was “nothing to make it pleasant.” On one particularly blue day, Fiske confessed: “Oh, how I wish I had never come

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here.” Obviously, she felt very isolated, just as Bartlett might have in his rural corner of Connecticut if not for his proclivity for mail order. Over time, however, Fiske found ways to cope. She celebrated the arrival of the “organ” her husband brought home one fall night in 1873 and later recorded an address, like Bartlett, in the endleaves of her 1884 diary for a “Cassell & Co. 739–41 Broadway,” presumably New York, where she hoped to order a catalog or sundry goods.72 In various ways her Standard Diary bore witness to the connections Fiske forged to make her life less lonely, much of it in the form of reading. “F. brought home ‘Practical Floriculture,’” she wrote one rainy February day in 1875. On another occasion, Fiske fi nished a day’s entry about “baking 31 pies” with a phrase that must have cheered her: “F. brought Bryant’s poems tonight.” In the “Memo” pages of her Standard Diary, she began to compile extensive reading lists and recorded that she had joined a “Reading Circle at Mr. Thurber’s.” She enlisted the “Letters Received and Answered” pages of her diaries to maintain her prolific correspondence, a critical antidote to her feelings of isolation. She explored other avenues of intellectual fulfi llment, such as the “sample copy” of the “Art Interchange” she ordered for “20 cents,” a transaction she recorded at the back of her 1885 Standard Diary.73 Fiske’s isolation was more pronounced, at times, than Bartlett’s, who was restricted by his youth and obligations to the family farm. Her fi rst years in Webster were punctuated by two pregnancies, the fi rst of which resulted in a stillborn child. Aside from the morning sickness she suffered, Fiske resented being confi ned to the house in the late stages of her pregnancy, as is evident in the following entry: “wanted to go to the station to see the Dr. & Esther, but could not & was so homesick about it could scarcely live. It is very likely the last chance I shall ever have to see any of my friends.” 74 Fiske’s thirst for community, in many ways, reflected the social connections her counterparts routinely recorded in their daily planners a generation earlier. Diarists wrote of attending quilting parties, church socials, temperance lectures, and reading circles among other activities. Visiting was another activity that connected neighbors and kin. An established cultural ritual, visiting was a customary part of the lives of rural families throughout New England in the antebellum period and beyond. Neighbors and family members visited one another to mark occasions both joyful and sorrowful, such as the arrival of a newborn or

Figure 4.5. The title page of Bartlett’s 1880 National Diary depicts a version of American progress. Author’s collection.

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death of a loved one or simply to pass the time.75 While customers continued to record such visits in their pocket diaries, many like Bartlett began to look beyond the borders of their village, town, or valley in search of an association less self-contained or restrictive. Steeped in images of distant locales within the contiguous United States as well as features that underscored a boundless nation, a commercial diary, especially ones with titles such as the National Diary or the American Diary, supplied that link to a broader whole. Such visions easily rubbed off on diaries’ users. Take, for instance, the inscription left by eighteen-year-old Ella Pierce on the endleaf of her 1877 Centennial Diary: “Property of Ella A. Pierce of Roxbury, Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States of America.” 76 Both practical and sentimental, an inscription was a common feature in many nineteenth-century diaries. Owners used a dedication to record the diary’s receipt as a gift or to insure its return in case it was lost. What set Pierce’s entry apart was its length. Most inscriptions ended where Pierce began, with a local address and nothing more. But Pierce went on, including her county, state, and nation. Enlisting a hierarchy of place names, Pierce acknowledged her relationship to a much wider world. Pierce saw herself not simply as a resident of Roxbury but as a citizen of a greater United States. Writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, poet and essayist Walt Whitman identified this postbellum shift in perspective in an essay titled “Nationality (and Yet).” Like many intellectuals who bemoaned the carnage and divisions wrought by war, Whitman was understandably preoccupied with how to maintain “the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the future” in light of the competing allegiances of “myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and physically perfect individualities.” Whitman’s solution was to combine the individual with the nation. As Whitman put it: Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come, in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi Valley, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY.

It was just this sort of marriage of identities that the Standard Diary and its ilk reinforced on every page. Even as the diary pages allowed a customer to acknowledge that he was “thinking and acting for himself,” the

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Standard Diary never let him forget, by virtue of its very makeup, his association to the “common aggregate, the Union.” 77 The daily planner straddled both dimensions, allowing Ella Pierce to exercise her individualism and her nationalism at once. *

*

*

Helping customers like Bartlett and Pierce make the leap to a national identity was just one way the commercial diary moved customers toward modernity. The Standard Diary also exerted its influence in matters of time. A daily planner enabled customers to internalize a new sense of time. It inculcated a timing habit that could not be achieved simply by donning a new watch. Writing the time in their daily planner made it their own in a way that simply telling time could not. All of the temporal features of the Standard Diary, the calendar, the time tables, and the essays introducing the new standard time, invited customers to add clock time as a way to order their lives just as their diaries did.78 They surrendered to clock time like never before, using it in concert with their daily planners to set appointments, divvy up their days into smaller increments, or give meaning to recurring activities such as bedtime or mealtime. This may not seem like anything new. After all, the daily planner and the clock had maintained a close relationship since the colonial heyday of the American almanac, with one device often reliant on the other for setting in time monumental events like births and deaths. However, many diary users up through the Civil War resisted the clock’s urgency in favor of the diary’s daily rhythm. For many, it was an issue of trust. Paper was more reliable than the temperamental mechanics of the clock. Unable to lie, a commercial diary was never inaccurate. A clock, on the other hand, could never be fully trusted. Indeed, reliability remained an issue for the young Alvin Bartlett despite his enthusiasm for his new wristwatch. Nevertheless, aside from lingering concerns over dependability, clock time began to seep into the daily entries of countless Standard Diaries. For some it was a necessity as they began to use their daily planners as publishers intended: as engagement calendars. But others less ruled by busy lives appeared just as interested in incorporating clock time into their daily records. It might be tempting to dismiss the clock’s appearance in the commercial diaries of the post–Civil War era as coincidental, an obvious by-product of increased watch sales and a society more

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steeped in mechanical time.79 While both trends are well documented, the Standard Diary was not just some convenient bystander to such changes. Clock time was hard to avoid for any diary customer interested in engaging with the world, as is evident in this New Year’s Day entry written by Baltimore judge Walter Dawkins in 1899: I wanted to take an extra sleep this morning but I had made an engagement to meet my dear Sister Eva at Union Station in time to catch 9.42 am train so I hurried to station—found Eva there—Her train was nearly an hour late so we waited for it—fi nally took it for Washington—arriving in Washington about 11.30—This time a late train served us a good purpose we found a train in the Station which was also late—we boarded it and arrived at Alexandria about 12.30 met with a most hearty & cordial reception from our Griggs friends to whose home 113 S. Columbus St we went & spent rest of day . . . enjoying ourselves

Few Americans living in the city or country were immune to such delays and often traveled equipped with railroad timetables inserted inside the pockets of their daily planners. Librarian Charles Hale of Worcester, Massachusetts, had squirreled away a timetable for the “Boston and Albany R.R.” between the pages of his 1890 Standard Diary. Hale was among those diarists who used the stationery product as its manufacturers intended, setting down the date and time of future engagements in the appropriate spaces of the datebook. For instance, underneath the date “Jan. 22,” Hale penciled in “Marriage Miss W 6 P.M.” and the next day underlined his own entry regarding the “Church Show.” A month later after a brief list reminding him to buy “Lamswool soles” and “Henleys,” he wrote “Flints at home 4 till 10,” perhaps planning to drop by the Flints for a visit that Wednesday evening. Women, too, especially those as engaged in society as Boston socialite Sarah Watson Dana, attended to clock time out of necessity. Even while traveling abroad in Italy, Dana kept her eye trained on the clock as she wrote in February 1873 that “Charlotte & I left Casa Violini at 7 + Raphael with us to station & bought tickets & put us in cars . . . We arrived Rome at 6 P.M. rainbows & bright sunset.” Clock time was an inescapable feature of modern life.80 Americans caught trains, attended meetings, scheduled business appointments, and met friends for lunch. As such, it figured that clock time

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would make more frequent appearances in the blank spaces of the daily planner. It became a critical component of arranging one’s days. That helps explain why diary manufacturers supplied its customers with tools and treatises about the railroad’s adoption of standard time zones in November 1883. Although the concept of standard time would be contested in the courts for years to come, with some cities and towns going along more readily than others, there were plenty of other factors such as electric lighting and telegraphs that heightened Americans’ awareness of time’s impact on their daily lives. 81 But clock time also appeared in daily planners when the minutes and hours did not seem to matter so much. Even when Walter Dawkins wasn’t rushing to catch a train, he kept a close eye on his watch, recording on April 19, 1899, that “In afternoon late about 5.30 I took a short bicycle ride out Druid Hill Park & up Pimlico.” One wonders, too, why the teenaged Ella Pierce was so fanatical about keeping her watch wound. At the end of a day’s entry in January 1877, Pierce remarked: “I am the last one up every night, so I wind my watch before going up stairs for bed.” At least a year away from taking a position as a local teacher, Pierce had few reasons to pay heed to the minute hands of a clock. As her mother’s sole help, she spent most of her days washing dishes, making beds, doing wash, baking, sewing, and other household chores. Yet clock time is sprinkled throughout her daily planner to mark her bedtime or the hours when friends called. The following entry is typical of the way she incorporated clock time into her daily account: “It is now after nine o’clock and I am going to retire as soon as I have written in my diary.”82 It was as if the addition of clock time would enable Dawkins and Pierce to relive these moments with more precision. Perhaps the same reason George Gardner of Nantucket, Massachusetts, added the time of day to an inscription inside his 1887 Standard Diary that read “Geo. C. Gardner 2nd A present from Lottie Dec. 31st 1886 5.45 PM.”83 For Gardner, the insertion of the time into a conventional inscription helped him recall the evening spent huddled with his wife by the fi re as they exchanged New Year’s gifts. Others used clock time as a matter of routine. Not a day went by that Margaret Twist of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, failed to record her time of rising whether it was a weekday or the weekend. Just as some diarists opened their entries with a brief weather report such as “Clear” or “Pleasant,” Twist began with the recurring phrase “Got up at 8:30” or “Got up at 7:30.” On Tuesday, September 29, she wrote:

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Got up 9.30 clear read all morning ironed in afternoon Chas came down 5 o’clock mother went to ucker

Attorney George Watson Cole of Connecticut preferred to record his bedtime rather than his rising time. On January 24, 1874, he noted that he had begun reading “the Blythedale Romance,” which he much preferred to “The Scarlet Letter,” and ended with “Retire about 11 oclock as usual.” Jennie Gregory of Geneva, Ohio, was even more habitual, closing each day’s entry with the phrase “went to bed.” Gregory’s approach was reminiscent of the way in which the famed seventeenth- century English diarist Samuel Pepys closed his diary with the words “and so to bed.” However, Gregory, writing in an 1895 Standard Diary, always added the hour of night as she did for these three consecutive days in September: (Sun 22) . . . went to Peg’s house for supper got home about nine and went to bed . . . (Mon 23) . . . up to Flo’s after supper I went up town and Bert went over the Office I got home a little after 8went to bed about ten (Tues 24) . . . Bert met me at the depot I went up town in evening & Bert went over to the Shop went to bed about ten. 84

Embellishing their diary entries with clock time reflected how much customers had embraced the shift to mechanical time. Inserting the time of day into their diary record had become a habit for Twist, Cole, and Gregory. Paired with the exercise of diary keeping, marking the time of even the most trivial or mundane activities reinforced the sense of control one got from owning a commercial diary.85 For women like Gregory and Pierce whose lives were not ruled by 9 to 5 jobs, setting a day’s activities in time gave their days meaning. As they reread their diaries, Gregory and Pierce saw a logical arrangement of dates and times that suf-

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fused their entries with an order and purpose that they might not have had if listed more willy-nilly. For men like Cole who went to an office every day, recording the time he retired every night was a matter of discipline. Ever mindful of getting enough sleep to insure a successful day in court or at the office, Cole did not like getting to bed too late. Faithfully noting the hour he retired each night seemed to keep Cole honest, never allowing him to stretch the evening too long. It was no longer enough to parse the days of the week, to make an entry for each day that sets it apart. Diary customers had to defi ne the hours within the day, to answer for the hours and minutes between waking and sleeping. As clock time took hold, the hours and minutes mattered more even for the most mundane actions of one’s day. But that was not case for everyone. Jane Fiske’s attitude toward time, once again, marked her as a throwback to an earlier generation who appeared reluctant to surrender to the urgency of the clock. Like other veterans of Lowell’s factory system such as Susan Brown, Fiske conceded to clock time out of necessity, preferring to designate the timing of most events with the phrases “in the morning” or “in the evening.” Only when she was teaching freed slaves in Washington, DC, in 1871, did the hour of the day impose itself.86 Once Fiske was settled on her husband’s New Hampshire farm, all references to clock time in her diary ceased, almost as if Fiske realized that marking the hours made the day feel too long. For Fiske it was enough to parse her days into thirds: morning, afternoon, and night. Consider how she organized her daily rituals in the winter of 1873: Wednesday 8: Fine morning but did not last and nearly stormed F. went to Concord but did not get off early. Did nothing extra all day but make some ginger snaps. Mother been sick all the week—better today. Miss Whittier here tonight. ... Saturday 11: Beautiful day but very cold. F. away to Concord early. Made twenty one pies this morning & this afternoon ginger snaps and roasted a turkey. Bro. William churned Went to bed right tired with a letter from Florence Bernsman. ... Friday 17: Day much like yesterday only more doubtful. Felt wretchedly all the morning & hardly able to be up: better in the afternoon and salted meat and cut apples for pies. Lay down toward night F. home early.87

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It is difficult for anyone but Fiske to know exactly what “toward night” or “early” meant in terms of clock time. Fiske did not need a clock to order her days on the farm since she rarely had any place to be. Because her days seemed long and trying enough, Fiske resisted the tendency of timing her routines as Ella Pierce or Margaret Twist had. It wasn’t as if Fiske was interested in recalling these moments as other customers might have wished to. So while the commercial diaries of the post–Civil War era may have encouraged a new generation to embrace clock time, it did not impose its accelerated timing on everyone. Because of his age and enthusiasm for new gadgets, one might expect Alvin Bartlett to be among those customers who wrote clock time into the daily spaces of his Standard Diary. In fact, Bartlett’s very fi rst entry in his 1879 Standard Diary contained a single sentence: “I got my watch.” After that Bartlett referred to watches on more than twenty separate occasions in his inaugural diary. He “got” them, “traded” them with friends and classmates, “repaired” them, “loaned” them, and shopped for them. Relying on these references alone, one would assume Bartlett was obsessed with clock time. Yet the phrase “o’clock” never appeared in Bartlett’s 1879 diary. Despite his passion for his watch, Bartlett did not seem to understand what it meant to own one, or at least that is how it seemed from the way he recounted his days. Bartlett “drove the cows to water,” “husked the corn,” “done the chores,” “went to school,” and “played ball,” never once mentioning when he did or for how long. Although it probably did not matter what time Bartlett did his “chores,” he still needed to get to school on time. While the absence of clock time in Bartlett’s diaries did not necessarily mean he ignored the hours of the day, it suggests that he did not use the clock, at least initially, to organize his days as other customers did. It took more than a decade for clock time to appear more routinely in Bartlett’s diary. On November 3, 1889, Bartlett wrote that he “Arose about 10 a.m. had Breakfast at 12. Started for home. arrived about 1 p.m.” After husking corn for two days later that same week, Bartlett “started for Dr. Beebes, called at Curtises, arrived at 1 p.m. Drove to Barrington. Left for home 7, arrived about 10.” In the following year’s 1890 American Diary, Bartlett, then aged twenty-six, was still angling for a new watch, this time from a company in Chicago called R. W. Sears Watch Company, a small Midwest fi rm that would soon grow into that other mail-order giant, Sears and Roebuck.88

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Bartlett’s fi rst watch, much like his Standard Diary, was a commercial novelty that symbolized his move toward adulthood with new responsibilities. His daily planner and his watch marked him as a grown-up with places to go, appointments to keep, and activities worth recording. A watch joined the pocket diary as the perfect coming-of-age gift.89 Another teenager with little call for timekeeping, Ella Pierce of Roxbury, Connecticut, received “quite a pretty watch-case” for her eighteenth birthday (June 16, 1877). On a memorandum page at the back of his 1883 Standard Diary, Wilmington engineer Thomas Savery assembled a Christmas list for his children that consisted of “Afgan” or “apron” for the girls and an “alarm clock” or “Diary” for the boys.90 Judging from Bartlett’s early diaries, simply owning a watch, or a daily planner, did not automatically transform a boy into a man no matter his aspirations. Both the commercial diary and the clock had its limits. Even if Fiske and Bartlett were unwilling to be ruled by their timepieces, they allowed their commercial diaries to give shape and purpose to their lives. They did not need the accelerated rhythms of the clock. Affi rming the Standard Diary’s power, the author of the Cambridgeport company’s entry in The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six wrote that he hoped the diary was “encouraging methodical habits, thrift, and well-ordered lives.”91 Bartlett especially may have craved these benefits since, he revealed later, his mother was in no condition to offer such direction to her two sons, Alvin and Hiram. In May 1886, Bartlett recorded that his “Mother went to Middletown,” the home of the Connecticut Asylum for the Insane. There was no telling how long his mother had suffered from mental illness, but her absence in Bartlett’s diaries suggests Bartlett and his brother were very much on their own. Although it was clear Bartlett on occasion turned to his neighbors for help, he also relied on his Standard Diary to establish routines and a sense of normalcy. It was the same approach exercised by Alvin’s younger brother, Hiram, in the American Diary for 1885, which he bought for 75 cents at W. B. Phelps Apothecaries in West Winsted, Connecticut. In fact, their entries were so similar that one might easily have mistaken the 1885 diary for Alvin’s. Day after day, Hiram wrote, “went to school” or “Went down to East Canaan & out to Norfolk” or “Went over to Mr Days,” just like his brother. While Hiram’s older brother may have shown him how it was done, Alvin most likely taught himself, following the printed cues in his diary. For instance, Bartlett never bothered

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to note the weather or temperature each day, until his diary suggested he do so. Bartlett’s 1880 National Diary, manufactured by Case, Lockwood, and Brainard of Hartford, Connecticut, offered a printed heading at the top of each entry that included the day of the week, the date, and a space for the “Ther.” and “Weather” each day. Bartlett dutifully complied from January onward. And when he returned to the Standard Diary brand the next year in 1881, which reserved no such space at the top of the page for the weather, Bartlett wrote it at the top of the page anyway, precisely where his previous year’s diary had prompted him to put it, a habit he would adhere to in every diary thereafter.92 The sway Fiske’s commercial diaries may have had on her record keeping is harder to deduce. Fiske had long been writing letters and making social calls before a commercial diary told her she should do so with its section devoted to “Calls and Letters Received and Answered.” Once diary publisher Dresser added the “Calls and Letters” pages to his Standard Diary, Fiske used it religiously, recording as many as seven letters answered in one day. When in 1889 Fiske was given or purchased Standard Diary No. 103, perhaps a gentlemen’s version since it had no “Calls and Letters” section, Fiske converted the “Cash Account” pages, a space she generally left to her son and his scribblings anyway, into her record of “Letters Received and Answered.”93 No doubt Fiske came to value those extra pages in her Standard Diary as much as the diary section itself. While much of the Standard Diary’s influence lay in its ability to shape people’s experience of time and offer connections to the outside world, it also encouraged customers like Bartlett and Fiske to look inside themselves. It was not something manufacturers expected or anticipated. Even the author of the 1888 Harper’s Bazaar column praising the daily planner made clear that this is where publishers drew the line. “As containing a complete rescript of the events of one’s external life,” the author explained, the pocket diary was “exceedingly useful” and “interesting . . . without betraying any amount of that interior life which constitutes one’s reserves and personality.”94 Such a conclusion seems a reasonable assumption for a product marketed as an engagement calendar and portable account book. However, as its many customers discovered, the Standard Diary was much more than that. No matter the restrictions on space, customers found room on the page for themselves. Despite the strong hold that diary conventions continued to have on some customers, the Standard Diary’s self-centered format and dailiness conspired to al-

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low users every so often to move beyond trivia into the realm of thoughts and feelings. Fiske, once again a reflection of her generation, appeared most bound by convention in her daily planners. Conduct writers had much to say on the subject of what went into a diary.95 Once Fiske’s pregnancy (an especially veiled topic in Victorian culture) began to show, Fiske would be restricted to the house, or at the very least her own yard, which was why she wrote in one diary entry that it might be the “last chance” she would have to see her friends. Fiske often referred to her “condition” or how she was “feeling” circumspectly in letters to family, but the subject of her pregnancy never made it into her own diary. That is, until the baby was born. On June 29, 1873, Fiske had marked the arrival of her fi rst child with a straightforward announcement in her diary: “My baby born.” Nor did Fiske discuss the loss of her newborn until August 3 when she wrote: “F. took me to ride after breakfast to where our baby is buried.”96 As Fiske’s record demonstrates, diaries as a genre remained “disappointing sources of self-revelation” for much of the nineteenth century. Diary keeping as an introspective exercise involving the probing of one’s deepest thoughts in a journey of self-discovery, a method practiced by Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff whose diary was fi rst published in 1887 and later by writer Anaïs Nin, was still in its infancy when Fiske and Bartlett began their records.97 Bartlett and Fiske were writing within the confi nes of a diary world that was changing but had not yet changed. While Fiske’s and Bartlett’s diaries may have been personal records, they were not open books. They left much unsaid. Nevertheless, Fiske had her slips in diary decorum, but her transgressions tended to involve a strategy she, and other women diarists, had devised to alleviate the hardships of a not-so-bucolic country life: complaining. “This is a hateful hateful life—nothing to make it pleasant—no plants, no pets, and now even my music group given up. I can not go out, and nobody comes here. How long must it be,” Fiske asked rhetorically. She ended another entry: “Am tired, tired, tired. Isn’t there an end to this hateful life?” This went on for months in the year following her arrival in Webster. By December the themes had not changed, as Fiske once again confessed to her diary: “Oh what a weary life! Here in this gloomy house day after day. no books, no music, not even a pet kitten.” 98 Fiske’s situation would improve in time, especially with the arrival of her beloved “Willie,” who brightened her outlook considerably. With little formal education and no parent to guide him, Bartlett prob-

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ably had no real sense of diary etiquette and often crossed the boundaries of propriety.99 He routinely recorded incidents that his parents or grandparents would have left out of their daily records. One rainy Monday in the spring of 1886, Bartlett “sowed grass seed,” “Set out onions,” and “plowed [his] garden.” Almost as an afterthought, Bartlett then added at the bottom of the entry: “Jolly Jack made us a drunken call and showed his Sunday ass.” Then there was the time, according to Bartlett, “Hiram went off and left my father and I had to put on after him with a Horse & wore the skin all off my ass.” As hard as he worked at his farm chores, Bartlett could also be quite a reveler, recruited to play his fiddle at a local dance or ball. Paid occasionally in refreshments (“beer” or “cider”), Bartlett spent much of the next day “Trying to get over the dance.” Although Bartlett attended the local grammar school and subscribed to various newspapers, he was not a reader. His manners were influenced by the folks in his community, not an etiquette manual. Because his diary was for him alone, he did not worry about offending others with a phrase, whatever its meaning, like “Testicals a little out of order.”100 Unlike Fiske, Bartlett was not one to complain too much in the pages of his diary though even he could not help but vent when life was not going his way. After failing to get his “Abbey & Bartlett orchestra” off the ground in the winter of 1890, Bartlett found himself in Binghamton, New York, earning “$18 a month” tending a “Mr. Moore’s” greenhouse. But that gig did not work out either since Bartlett “settled up with Mr. Moore” less than a month later. Bartlett “bid all adieu” in Binghamton and set out for Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he made some money in May and June peddling “ink erasers” at the local ballpark. When the eraser business slowed, Bartlett sold his remaining stock of “1 doz Erasers” to his friend Fred. Out of money and options, it’s no wonder Bartlett felt compelled that June to write in his American Diary, “Feeling a little blue.” Nothing had worked out as he had planned, not even his love life. Back home, Bartlett “Walked out” with Bertine Rood, whose family had a farm in a section of North Canaan called Clayton, and then a girl by the name of Mary Lewis. Neither attachment lasted long, which might explain why Bartlett sent away for a 10-cent pamphlet, published by the Western Publishing Company of St. Louis, titled “Secrets for Lovers.” By late November, Bartlett was in Ansonia, Connecticut, talking “over business with Uncle” Egbert. At twenty-five years old, Bartlett ended 1890 no closer to fi nding his future than when he opened his first diary a decade earlier.101

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Even though Fiske’s and Bartlett’s commercial diaries were not necessarily private in the sense we might mean today as “secret,” they were personal and allowed them a space, however small, to move beyond the boundaries of convention. To be sure, this inward turn was not an isolated trend and was evident in personal letters and other forms of autobiography that had fewer restrictions on expression.102 But the fact that a Standard Diary might serve its users in this way is significant and points to the product’s ability to encourage a new direction in the way Americans recounted their lives on paper. In many ways Fiske’s and Bartlett’s diary keeping was more similar than different. Both were influenced by the market, by convention, by their own personal needs. But men and women were not the same and neither were their diaries. Literary scholars have published countless studies about the role diary keeping has played in women’s lives over the centuries and treated it as a unique form of female autobiography. Very often women, especially those on the American frontier, turned to their diaries as confidant or coping mechanism, hoping it might alleviate their loneliness or offer them an empathetic audience.103 This is true. In addition, the topics men and women emphasized in their diaries were those uppermost in their separate yet intersecting lives. Take the Saverys, for instance—the Wilmington, Delaware, couple who each kept a separate diary year after year from 1864 to 1910. Sallie Pim Savery’s volumes offer an almost clichéd picture of the diaries of a nineteenth- century middle-class woman. She dutifully recounted the couple’s honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls, the raising of her children, the management of her household, the letters from her mother, and her volunteer work for various charities. Thomas H. Savery focused on work, the family’s fi nances and investments, and his inventions. However, Thomas Savery also recorded things one might not have expected in a man’s diary, such as the stages of his wife’s pregnancy inserted in the margins of a calendar page. One day in May in his Excelsior Diary for 1886, Savery commemorated what must have felt like a monumental moment: “This day was issued to me Patent #341.72 for Wood Grinding Machines for Paper Pulp” (to make more cheap books!). Yet just above that entry on the day before, Savery immortalized another event that may have felt just as noteworthy, for he had arranged for the price of “$18” for a set of twelve “Photos of our family in a group.” The same man also copied poems into his “Memoranda” pages and, on one random diary page, drafted a letter to a doctor inquiring about how best to treat his ailing wife.104

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In sum, the gendered uses of the commercial diary were more clearcut in the minds of publishers than diarists. For instance, during the planting season, Fiske turned her diary pages into a virtual time sheet to help her husband keep track of the days a handful of laborers had worked each week. So instead of her more typical entries about “baking” and “sewing,” Fiske’s Sundays that given month looked more like this: Sunday, May 9: D here 2 1/2 days Isaac 1 ... Sunday, May 30: Rainy. Little 1 Kilborn 2 Isaac 2 Woodbury 1 1/2 ... Sunday, June 6: Rainy some & cold. D 4 days W 5 ” ” but went early one day

Due to their mother’s illness, Bartlett and his brother often fended for themselves. Occasionally, they would hire a girl, usually the teenage daughter of a neighbor, to assist with the washing and cooking. But Bartlett took on many tasks—what contemporaries might have called “woman’s work”—himself. Or, at least, that is the way it appears from the recipes he copied down in the “Memoranda” pages of his diaries. They covered the basics mostly, such as a recipe for plain sugar cookies, or another for that nineteenth-century staple known as “Johnny Cake”: 1 pt [part] corn meal 1 ” ” sweet milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoonfull cream tartar 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/2 ” ” salt 1/2 pt flour

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At the back of his 1889 diary, Bartlett transcribed recipes for “Soft Gingerbread” and “English Ginger Beer,” or ginger ale.105 Gender is, indeed, a very useful category of analysis, but by no means the only one with respect to diary keeping. Many factors could affect the ways in which a consumer might adapt his or her diary. Their level of education, social status, generation, or geographic location all played a part in shaping their individual records, no matter how regimented the form. Bartlett’s fascination with the commercial diary may have looked early on like a passing fad. It was something newfangled and modern that he could pull from his pocket to impress his classmates, like a new watch. But even Bartlett may not have imagined, when he began his record at fourteen, all that that miniature diary could deliver. Bartlett came to rely on it for so many things. It became the bible of his own little market world, tracking his day-to-day relationship with store-bought goods and the sale of his own labor. It held his daily “Cash Accounts” transactions throughout the year, including the wages he earned and the cash he spent on catalogs, mail-order items, ready-made suits, and countless other commercial goods for which he seemed to have an unquenchable thirst. It made his march through time more personal, complementing his mechanical timepiece that might mark the minutes—when it was working properly—but not the days. And even though Bartlett may not have realized it, the Standard Diary also helped him fi nd himself. It was there in those printed pages, in his daily reflections, however abbreviated, that Bartlett may have come to appreciate what was important to him. No matter her generation, Fiske was a thoroughly modern woman. By virtue of her education and status, she had a keen sense of who she was and did not need a diary—commercial or otherwise—to teach her that. But she, like so many women of the period, still could not escape the marriage bind. Because she could no longer support herself through wage labor, Fiske may have accepted marriage as a necessary and inevitable compromise.106 Still, marriage and country life, at least for Fiske, did not have to be a dead end. The Standard Diary aided Fiske in her trying transition from one life to the next. For Bartlett, his diary took him from a life of dependence to independence, and all the trials and tribulations that went with it; for Fiske, it was the opposite. In a journey of rediscovery, Fiske found—with her diary’s guidance—that she could connect to the world outside the home

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without leaving it: through her reading, through her letters, through her purchases, and through her son with whom she corresponded almost daily until her death. Should she ever feel lonely, she could turn to her diary for solace, for it always understood and never talked back. Fiske may have shunned some of the fruits of modern mass consumption such as ready-made clothing, but she never ignored an innovation that could simplify or enhance her life. She readily embraced the sewing machine, and when her eyesight began to fail her at age seventy-five, she enlisted a typewriter to compose her daily letters to Willie, by then an entomologist and head of the Gypsy Moth Laboratory in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts. The Standard Diary, too, was just such an innovation. But her Standard Diaries had a much deeper hold on Fiske than a typewriter or sewing machine ever could. As the stacks of Fiske’s commercial diaries grew over the years, so did her memories, all contained in those printed pages. She could pull them out at random, rereading and reliving all her life’s cumulative joys and sorrows. In her hands they became much more than a market commodity, a manufactured good; they represented her marriage, her motherhood, herself. Fiske may not have realized how critical her Standard Diary was until she had to give it up. In 1910, widowed and nearly blind, Fiske moved back to her hometown of Hanson to live with her niece, Caroline Thomas. Her last diary entries are almost indecipherable since she can barely see to write. On December 20, 1910, Fiske scrawled at the bottom of her entry, underneath the weather for that day, “W. gave me a typewriter.”107 Sadly, the typewriter could save her letter writing, but it could not salvage her commitment to her daily planners. After forty years, Fiske abandoned her Standard Diaries and her diary keeping for good. Fiske and Bartlett might never have become regular diary keepers without the Standard Diary. Bartlett did not have the time or the education to create a diary of his own out of a blank book. For Bartlett, what began as a store-bought novelty turned into a daily ritual. Bartlett’s diary became a mediator between himself and that larger world outside East Canaan, Connecticut. It helped him manage his buying and selling and reminded him of who he was and what he wanted no matter how tough the circumstances. Fiske forever complained about how little time she had for herself. Her Standard Diary afforded her a fraction of the self-indulgence she craved in little to no time. She could see to her baking, sewing, cleaning, child rearing, and other motherly duties and never

Figure 4.6. One of Jane Fiske’s last entries in her 1910 Standard Diary. Fiske gave up diary keeping since the loss of her eyesight made it difficult to write. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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miss a day in her diary. Fiske may have never returned to that book she was writing or turned to a lengthier journal, but she had no trouble filling the smaller spaces in her printed diary. Indeed, from Fiske’s perspective, its format may have been more liberating than restrictive, for without it she may have written nothing at all. In it, Fiske fostered connections to her family and her self and felt reassured by the diary’s more global features that she was never completely removed from the world beyond the home. As Bartlett’s and Fiske’s diaries attest, Dresser and his cohort had managed to create a product that was inclusive, adaptable, cheap, yet refi ned. By the late nineteenth century, the pocket diary had become nearly universal. No one would think to look in the corner stationery shop for evidence of the societal and cultural trends of post–Civil War America. There are plenty of other, more obvious, places to look: in art and literature, politics, and public institutions. Itself a by-product of a mass consumer culture that delivered goods into the hands of most Americans, the Standard Diary simultaneously gave its owners a method to manage that shift from producer to buyer. In the process it offered them a virtual connection to a national market of goods and a nation of diary users that was affi rmed in the titles of the more popular versions such as the American Diary and the National Diary. Still aching from the divisions and grief of war, a generation searched, and found, in its pages an order and unity that could be fulfi lled with little effort and no great forethought. And for those more resistant to change, the daily planner was content to nudge, rather than shove, its owners into the modern age. Edwin Dresser’s feat of turning a humble daily organizer into a household name would not go unnoticed. A Standard Diary customer himself, retail giant John Wanamaker hoped to build on Dresser’s success by marrying a diary with his department store’s catalog under a single hardbound cover. It was a move that signaled the culmination of the daily planner’s long-standing connection to the commercial imperatives of its producers.

Chapter Five

The Daily Planner Meets the Adman

J

ohn Wanamaker may be best remembered as a great adman, an enthusiast of all kinds of marketing and publicity stunts designed to get customers into his department store. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, free concerts, opulent holiday displays, Broadway-inspired fashion shows, and the world’s largest pipe organ drew in thousands of customers by train and by car to his flagship stores in Philadelphia and New York. In print, Wanamaker prided himself on being at the forefront of “scientific” approaches to advertising, taking the lead on “plain talk advertisements” and using the “eye-appeal” of pictures to sell goods.1 What most Americans do not realize is that the retail giant was also a great fan of the daily planner. As early as 1857, Wanamaker, not yet twenty years old, purchased a Pocket Diary . . . for Registering Events of Past or Present Occurrence to jot down reminders and appointments. It was several years before opening his own dry goods emporium, and Wanamaker was managing the men’s department at Tower Hall, the largest clothing store in Philadelphia. He liked to scribble aphorisms in the margins of his organizer, such as “Always fi nish one thing before you begin another” or “Never put off till to morrow what can be done today.” A devout Methodist, Wanamaker vowed in an 1860 pocket diary published by Kiggins and Kellogg “to herein make a record of the doings of each day. Oh that I may redeem the time,” reflecting his commitment to the abiding Protestant ethic of self-improvement. Even after his rise to department store fame, Wanamaker stuck to his habit, purchasing a daily organizer of one brand or another into his old age.2 He hoped his customers would do the same. In 1900, his fi rm, Wanamaker’s, introduced a diary all its own. But this was no ordinary daily planner. At fi rst glance, the Wanamaker Diary looked more like Montgomery

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Ward’s latest catalog. Although small by Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward standards, the five- by seven-inch hardbound book was teeming with advertisements of all the latest goods from “P.C.C. Brassieres . . . For Women Who Care” to Lifebuoy soap, all available at Wanamaker’s stores. Just like a catalog, a customer could open to an extensive index of advertisers broken down by category, from “autocars” to “women’s wear.” Interspersed throughout the diary section were advertisements for candle shades, wardrobe trunks, suits, collars, tooth powder, pajamas, eyeglasses, dinnerware, and Bibles. A customer might not even realize she was holding a diary until she turned to page 69, the opening of the diary section that devoted two days per page for record keeping amid a flurry of ads. For instance, opposite the eight lines allotted to Tuesday, May 13, in a 1913 Wanamaker Diary was a display for “Stoke’s Seed Store” and “Eppo Petticoats. The Delight of Womankind.” After recording all she had accomplished on August 23, a diarist could then glance at the facing page to peruse the benefits of “Denney’s Complexion Powder” and “Weil & Meyers” shirtwaists. 3 It was as if the diarist were walking through Wanamaker’s flagship store as she proceeded to record each new day. It was Wanamaker’s in miniature. Despite its deliberate resemblance to the era’s mail-order catalogs, the Wanamaker Diary borrowed many features from the pocket diaries John Wanamaker was so enamored with in his youth. Aside from the preformatted diary pages, the Wanamaker Diary offered separate sections for “Daily Expenses” and “Cash Accounts” in addition to the introduction of a half-page devoted to “Telephone Numbers.” Not unlike the American almanac in its colonial heyday, it also devoted dozens of pages to reference matter such as seating charts for the city’s most popular theaters, lists of legal holidays in various states, brief essays on history and science, and more literary offerings. Hardbound in red cloth and more than an inch thick, it was sturdier and larger than any pocket diary. Its place was on a desk, not stuffed in a pocket. It had a compact dictionary quality about it, a characteristic Wanamaker promoted in its design. Its appearance suggested this was a book one could not live without. To underscore the point, Wanamaker named the inaugural edition Wanamaker’s Ready Reference Diary for 1900 though he simplified it the following year to the Wanamaker Diary.4 Proof of its enduring popularity, the Wanamaker Diary survived as an annual store publication without interruption into the 1970s. This case study of the daily planner as advertising vehicle, a prede-

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Figure 5.1. Opposite the title page of the Wana maker Diary for 1913 was an advertisement for “P. C. C. Brassieres, Guaranteed Rust-Proof” intended “For Women Who Care.” Author’s collection.

cessor of the American Express Diary and other advertising desk calendars, underscores the persistent ties between commerce and the cultural habit of record keeping. If viewed in the long history of the commercialization of the daily planner, Wanamaker’s invention represented a natural outgrowth of the diary’s early association with matters of money and commerce. Many of the earliest American almanacs, you may recall, were used to track loans or record purchases, and Robert Aitken’s fi rst commercial diary was intended primarily as a portable account book for

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merchants and other businessmen. With the inclusion of interest tables and other fi nancial data, Aitken’s Register was designed to satisfy a businessman’s most basic need: to know how much money he had. Aitken’s successors, such as John Marsh of Boston and later Edwin Dresser of the Standard Diary Company, copied Aitken’s formula and offered consumers enough reference matter and prefabricated space to account for their daily activities as well as their spending. Some customers, such as Alvin Bartlett of East Canaan, Connecticut, converted popular diary brands into manuals of their buying life. Unlike the blank book entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, Wanamaker was not simply interested in selling more daily planners but selling his customers an array of goods, or an entire lifestyle. Even though the Wanamaker Diary looked more like a sales catalog than a diary, its appearance was not at all a shock to its customers. Indeed, many seemed comfortable, even blasé, about the presence of advertising in the midst of their diary entries. By the time Wanamaker floated the idea of a diary as store catalog, or vice versa, advertising had seeped into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives. That helps explain the enthusiastic reception of the Wanamaker Diary as well as its enduring popularity. This somewhat seamless continuity with the diary-keeping habits of the past offers us a telling window into the critique of consumer capitalism that argues that merchants such as Wanamaker usurped the language of citizenship, civic virtue, and rights and turned buying into voting and consumer choice into political free speech. 5 But those customers who embraced the Wanamaker Diary as their daily record demonstrate that the public’s engagement with such goods was more nuanced and idiosyncratic, a counter to such calls that consumer culture degraded rather than enriched civic and cultural norms. Emma Umholtz, a middle-aged wife and mother living in a small town on the edge of Pennsylvania coal country, could be considered Wanamaker’s ideal customer. Fully immersed in the consumer culture Wanamaker helped create, Umholtz demonstrated an intimate relationship with the goods displayed in her 1926 Wanamaker Diary. We know this because Umholtz didn’t just read the ads, she talked to them. She penned her replies within the text of the advertisements, responding to their claims as if she were speaking to Wanamaker himself. Picture a young boy running alongside his sister who is sitting atop a shiny new tricycle, one of Gendron’s “Pioneer Line” children’s vehicles. Umholtz liked what she saw but showing her age added somewhat ruefully un-

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derneath: “I wish I could still ride a Kiddie car and know what I know now.” Alongside a pitch for “The Console Cabinet Sewing Machine” sold in Wanamaker’s stores, Umholtz wrote that the electric contraption was “Wonderful. I’ll admit.” And as for Brownhill and Kramer’s “Full Fashioned and Seamless Hosiery,” she acknowledged, in writing, that “I wear em.”6 Wanamaker would have been pleased. The Wanamaker Diary seemed to elicit, for Umholtz at least, a desirable response. An avid diary keeper, she fi lled the daily spaces to the brim and welcomed the promotional packaging in which it came. Yet Umholtz was not about to accept everything she read without question and proved herself to be a tough critic and discerning shopper. Quick witted and budget conscious, Umholtz rejected a good deal of the consuming logic that accompanied the ads. An advertisement for the National Cash Register Company subscribed to the motto that “Quick service makes shopping a pleasure.” To that Umholtz replied with her own pen: “Also a fi lled pocket book.” Although she happily admitted donning Brownhill and Kramer’s hosiery, Umholtz was appalled by an ad on the next page for “Luxite Silk Lingerie.” Perhaps it was the illustration of a scantily clad woman wearing nothing but a lace-edged slip that shocked her, for she wrote in bold ink across the page “Never,” underlining it for emphasis. The Middletown Silver Company of Middletown, Connecticut, ran an advertisement for a “graceful double vegetable dish . . . beautifully fi nished in Louis XIV Panel Border . . . heavily silver plated over nickel silver,” many of them “with Pyrex linings.” Umholtz wasn’t sold. “My beans taste good out of the granite dish. Har Har!” she wrote, rejecting the luxury and refi nement the fancy chafi ng dish implied. The Long Furniture Company of Hanover, Pennsylvania, also bought a full page to sell its handcrafted dining room sets. Again, Umholtz liked what she saw but could not be lured by taste or refi nement alone. Her reply to the Long Furniture Company: “My style not my price.” 7 Umholtz’s conversation demonstrates that just because someone chose a Wanamaker diary over another brand did not mean she accepted Wanamaker’s retail sermon. Umholtz may have been a full and ready player in the consuming game, but she played by her own rules, not those Wanamaker and his marketing staff imposed on her. Aside from reminding us of the deep connections between diary keeping and spending, the Wanamaker Diary offers us a larger lesson about the impact of mass consumption on American culture in the early twentieth century. Many critics of consumer capitalism would have us

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believe that “new pleasure palaces [such] as department stores” ushered in a culture of desire that replaced older Christian and community values with a secularized ethic that focused purely on personal satisfaction. In the words of one critic, “American consumer capitalism produced a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a futureoriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods.”8 If one did not know its backstory, the Wanamaker Diary might be considered symbolic of this subversion of American traditions. Dreamed up by advertising men as another way to entice customers into endless cycles of spending, the Wanamaker Diary, it could be argued, was not a diary at all but a ploy to convince consumers they were engaged in a project of self-improvement even as they shopped the pages of the thinly disguised “catalog” for their latest acquisition. The only problem with this argument about the Wanamaker Diary, and the larger claims about the market-oriented culture that produced it, was the customer. She deserves more credit than critics often are willing to give. The fi lled-in diary pages of the dozens of Wanamaker Diaries that survive demonstrate a striking continuity with the past. The diary habits of this new consumer generation are not as far removed from those of their parents and grandparents. Indeed, many of the tenets of daily record keeping such as discipline and order weathered the transition into this new era. The fans of the Wanamaker Diary warn us not to accept too readily the claims by critics that the rise of the department store and other institutions promoting mass consumption necessarily generated a major break with the past. Still, it is critical to set the scene and admit that advertising was everywhere by the time Wanamaker introduced his diary in 1900. That may help explain why his customers’ transition to his advertising diary was so smooth. Patent medicine almanacs were only the beginning. In the 1880s, retailers and manufacturers enlisted visually rich advertising cards, most the size of a calling card, to spread brand recognition among their clientele. Many retailers used the same stock images such as floral bouquets or oriental fans, distinguishing it with their name, location, and often a calendar printed on the back. An 1887 trade card for John Reardon and Sons’ of Boston, Massachusetts, was typical. The soap manufacturer commissioned twenty-five images of young, fresh-faced girls in a series called “Morning of Life” to market their “Anchor, Oval, Antique, and Extra Family Soaps.” On the reverse, they invited customers to “Return 10 Wrappers of our . . . Soap and receive a set of CARDS of which

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this Card is one, or 25 Wrappers and receive our beautiful picture suitable for framing, called Morning of Life.” Although magazine advertising soon replaced the trade card as an advertising medium, such “picture” promotions paved the way for advertising as an art form.9 Posters, billboards, and electrical signs soon transformed the American landscape with visual messages produced by commercial artists. While touring Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia in 1913, a visitor from abroad was astounded to discover that “leading young ‘post-impressionist’ painters” from Paris had been “designing posters for this store for years.” Of course, it was no surprise to those who knew Wanamaker, who preached that “Pictures are the lesson books of the uneducated.” The new breed of admen were untroubled by the notion that advertising could be appreciated as fi ne art for the masses. In 1904, a trade press titled Fame celebrated the technical improvements achieved by commercial artists since the era of the trade card: “The magazine page and advertising calendar intended for free distribution to-day puts to shame the picture that only a few years ago would have been welcomed on the wall of the average moderately well-situated home.”10 Once again, although Wanamaker liked to consider himself a trailblazer, he was riding a trend long underway before the debut of his diary. With such advertising cues all around them, some diarists anticipated Wanamaker’s bright idea. Armed with glue pot and stick, Susan Brown of Byfield, Massachusetts, turned the endleaves of her 1890 Standard Diary into a virtual yellow pages. She pasted in the business or trade cards of movers, coal purveyors, seed distributors, plumbers, and solicitors, anyone she might need to contact in the coming year. She even obscured the diary’s title page when she pasted over it with an ad for the fi rm of “Hilton, Hughes, & Denning, successors to A. T. Stewart & Co.,” her material needs overruling the diary’s plain design. Others, such as Thomas H. Savery, a paper company executive of Wilmington, Delaware, preferred to stuff various trade cards into the pockets of their store-bought diaries.11 No matter their method, these diarists—following their own initiative—coupled advertising and diary keeping decades before Wanamaker did. Diarists such as Brown and Savery had long been convinced of their commercial diary’s benefits and transformed it to suit their shifting consumer needs. Taking this trend a step further, American children by the late nineteenth century began to dedicate entire albums to the collection and arrangement of advertising cards. In fact, this may have been what Alvin

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Bartlett was up to when he referred time and again in his Standard Diaries to the “cromo cards” he had sent away for. Once he received them, Bartlett may have pasted them in a scrapbook for posterity. The exercise itself was supposed to encourage discipline and promote selfconstruction, an extension of a commonplace tradition in which pupils gathered poems, essays, and other literary fragments in a notebook for educational purposes. Long before pupils could take schoolbooks home, they created their own. After the invention of lithography in the nineteenth century, youngsters replaced handwritten transcriptions with colorful visual images to represent what words alone used to express. For instance, one compiler explained that the forget-me-nots displayed on Lord & Taylor’s trade card was “a sign to awaken thought, in friends who are far away.”12 These albums dedicated entirely to advertising cards were part of a broader movement of scrapbook making, or scrapbooking, that began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With the print explosion that attended the communication revolution and technological developments like lithography, Americans now had plenty of media to mine for scraps that could then be clipped and pasted in blank books. Scrapbooking, a practice that grew alongside the rise of the daily planner, took off and led to the creation of thousands of autograph albums, friendship books, and later photograph albums. From the beginning, publishers hoped to capitalize on the trend, offering ready-made albums for customers caught by the scrapbooking bug. In 1825, a bookseller introduced Shipment’s Common Sense Binder and five years later another debuted the Ideal Patented Scrapbook. Even Mark Twain got into the act, patenting a blank scrapbook in 1873 amid his own claims that it was the “only rational scrapbook the world has ever seen.” Like the commercial diary, the album became a consumer product that was mass-produced and marketed as “unique and individualized.”13 Because users looked to the magazines, newspapers, and other media for their snippets, scrapbooking blurred the line between print and consumer culture decades before Wanamaker introduced his diary. “Compilers personalized their clippings,” according to one scholar, “and infused them with individual meaning outside the arena of market exchange.” Such personalization foreshadowed the connection many owners would form with their Wanamaker Diaries. But that did not mean their albums had no connection to the rituals of consumption. By composing pages fi lled with advertising images and manipulating cutouts of furniture,

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packaged foods, and other consumer goods, scrapbookers identified themselves through these virtual possessions and reflected their willingness to learn and practice a new “language” of mass consumption.14 In many ways, the Wanamaker Diary represented the culmination of these trends. The Wanamaker Diary did not simply blur the line between print and commercial capitalism, it removed the line entirely. Wanamaker made no pretense of his efforts to promote and sell his merchandise in this new venue. In every instance he wore his advertising and marketing hat with pride. The Wanamaker Diary could be viewed as one of Wanamaker’s many innovative sales vehicles. Scrapbooking and the trade card craze help explain why many customers welcomed the Wanamaker Diary with open pens. But just because customers were prepared for Wanamaker’s advertising-laced diary did not mean it had no effect on them. Owning a Wanamaker Diary marked them as loyal Wanamaker customers. It welcomed them into a community of shoppers and savvy consumers who were eager to receive the “schooling” Wanamaker delivered in the diary’s pages. The diary offered lessons in budgeting, for instance, and introduced them to the benefits of Wanamaker’s vast merchandise. It gave them permission to spend their hard-earned money and to defi ne themselves as arbiters of a discerning yet budget-conscious middle-class taste. Rather than be censorious, Wanamaker encouraged his customers to foster an intimate and interactive relationship with the goods in his stores. The Wanamaker Diary underwrote and endorsed this new life of acquisition. Nevertheless, even as Wanamaker delivered his retail sermon in the pages of his daily planner, he spread a diary gospel that helped preserve a cultural tradition as old as the First Founders. That is what made the Wanamaker Diary so critical in the long history of the commercial product. It showed his clientele how easy and satisfying it could be to record every day. Even though the combination of diary keeping and sales catalog looked like an aberration, the Wanamaker Diary and its positive reception were consistent with the commercial diary’s past. Diary keeping was never solely about interiority or self-reflection but about imposing order on an outside world that felt increasingly chaotic and unmanageable without the help of a printed aid. Not even Wanamaker could predict the many ways his diary would be adapted to suit the needs of individuals. Some customers beat Wanamaker at his own game. When she ran out of space in the last entry of her 1913 Wanamaker Diary, fi fteen-year-old Margaret Moffat continued

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writing, carrying over into an advertisement for cooking utensils. Blotting out what appeared to be an ad for Irish crochet lace in her 1905 Wanamaker Diary, a Philadelphia woman pasted a newspaper article titled “Weather Record of Closing Month” and a published list of post offices in the Philadelphia area. She did so again across an announcement for a white sale at Wanamaker’s with a newspaper recap of Christmasday weather since 1872. George H. Taylor, of Jenkenstown, Pennsylvania, converted his 1904 Wanamaker Diary into a scrapbook of political cartoons and news photographs, substituting Wanamaker’s commercial images with political themes of the day, including Teddy Roosevelt’s battle with corporate trusts and tussles with the 58th Congress. Even Emma Umholtz, who playfully engaged with the ads in her 1926 diary, often ignored them out of necessity. When she ran out of room in her diary section, she simply roamed Wanamaker’s red book for any available white space. Couched within an ad for dining room sets manufactured by Rockford Chair and Furniture Company of Rockford, Illinois, Umholtz, squeezing in her own words amid the ad copy, mourned the departure of her sons at the end of summer break: Gee today August 31st 1926 The boys returned to Girard College. I feel blue but why should I. I am crabby but know I would not be if I were not so nervous I defy the man or woman who can say they “love” their “children” more than “I do” Just because I like things nice and orderly they call me a crank All right A Loving Mother.15

It was as if the ads were invisible. These users pasted over the advertising messages in favor of their memories. They turned the pitches into some-

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thing more personal and exercised the power to override the product’s overtly commercial character. Such variety demonstrates the diversity of customers drawn to the Wanamaker Diary, many of them new to diary keeping. Its users tended to live in urban centers or small towns in the mid-Atlantic states, close to where Wanamaker’s was founded and where its name, as a result, carried the most weight.16 But that did not mean that its audience was not as diverse as one whose brand was distributed nationally. Some attended Mass every Sunday. Another dined out on a “sour-krout supper.” One found a German-speaking church. A female user wrote of her sympathy for striking miners, perhaps a miner’s wife herself. Even though she ripped out any evidence of her diary keeping, Olga Zalokoski left her signature on the front cover of her Wanamaker Diary. These entries offer clues to their identities and suggest an expansion of the diary-keeping fold into immigrant communities. They were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They were part of an expanding middle class, some fi rst- or second-generation Americans intent on belonging and participating in the material abundance their parents or grandparents had aspired to as immigrants. Most of them were women. Often in middle age, they were married with grown children and used their diaries to stave off loneliness or give their daily activities a sense of meaning. One woman recorded nothing in her diary but the daily family menu: “Chicken vegetable soup, Left-overs from day before” or “Liver, mashed potatoes, hot slaw.”17 They may not have talked to the advertisements scattered among the diary pages as Umholtz did, but they did not seem to mind the diary’s commercial nature. After all, they could have chosen a different diary. For many, the Wanamaker Diary was the fi rst diary they had ever owned. Not only did the Wanamaker Diary serve as an ambassador of Wanamaker’s department store, it simultaneously sold hundreds on the advantages of a keeping a diary. It did not take Margaret Moffat, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, long to appreciate a diary’s benefits. Nearing the last page of her 1913 Wanamaker Diary, Moffat wrote: “Resolved—to keep another diary next year.” Two years later on a blank page reserved for addresses in her 1915 Wanamaker Diary, Moffat marveled what a tremendous effect her record keeping could have on her mood. “When You Write / It’s queer, when I think of it, / That something, square & white / Like an envelope, can make me happy, / As it does, when you write!” She

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continued to choose a Wanamaker Diary each year until 1971. At fi ftynine, Mary Taylor admitted in the fi rst entry of her 1905 Wanamaker Diary, a “Christmas gift” from her granddaughter, that it was only her “second year in keeping a daily account of events.” As a diary novice, Taylor took to the habit quite naturally, often spilling over into the margins. Even a young William Styron, decades before winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, fulfi lled a pledge to complete every blank in his 1940 Wanamaker Diary at the request of his father. Not yet fi fteen, Styron, of Newport News, Virginia, wrote about school and evenings spent at the movies, listening to “Fibber McGee & Molly” on the radio, or playing chess or cards with his best friends “Jim” and “Bud.” While Wanamaker surely intended his diary to urge his customers to spend, it also encouraged them to write.18 Aside from enlisting new users, the Wanamaker Diary helped preserve the values that generations had attached to the daily habit. The teenaged Moffat, just fi fteen, closed her 1913 daily planner with the following remarks: “Finished reading the Bible all the way through . . . I can honestly say this but I can still stand to read it 300,000 more times. Went to S. S. Entertainment in evening. Walked home.” Unless you held the original in your hands, you would never know from reading it that Moffat was summing up her year in a Wanamaker Diary. Her entries might have been mistaken for those of her parents or grandparents at her age. She wrote about attending school, bible study, and a lecture on “Niagara Falls”; the local weather whether steamy hot or frigid cold; visiting her friends and relatives; and her efforts toward self-improvement such as a year-end directive to “Watch my tongue!” She seemed immune to the commercial character of her chosen product. In fact, Moffat routinely wrote a warning on the diary’s cover asking that others “Please do not read this book. It is personal property.” For Moffat, it did not matter that her Wanamaker Diary was steeped in ads and carried an implicit endorsement of mass consumption into the most private spaces of the home. Not just a passing fancy, Moffat never outgrew her devotion to the Wanamaker Diary. Even after she got her first job, moved into her own apartment, and saved enough to buy her fi rst automobile, Moffat never gave up her daily habit of writing in her Wanamaker Diary. She stuck to it long enough to write about her own retirement in 1966 and beyond, making her last entry on December 30, 1971, still focused on getting caught up on her “letters” and calling on sick friends.19 Just because Wanamaker invented a new kind of diary did not mean it

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produced a new kind of diarist. The Wanamaker Diary did not necessarily change the way customers wrote. On every page, there was much that was reflective of the past. After all, many entries seemed dictated by life itself: births, marriages, work, and death. A great deal of space still was devoted to reporting visits to loved ones and friends. Many noted with regularity their fulfi llment of religious duties such as attending church and Sunday school or going to confession. Just as Aaron Wight did in his almanacs more than a century earlier, some began their entries with a note about the weather, a detail that by the early twentieth century may have had as much to do with marking time’s passage as any real concern for its impact on their ability to move around town. The commercial clutter of the receptacle did not affect the persistence of such topics. Although every diary never looked exactly the same, there were many constants, which is why so much of what people wrote in their Wanamaker Diaries had such a familiar ring. Many of the tenets of diary keeping survived the transition into the era of Wanamaker’s advertising diary. Parents especially enlisted the inexpensive annual to school teenagers such as Moffat on the benefits of the daily habit. At fi rst, Moffat worried that “I never seem to do a thing worth putting down” but soon realized that her diary might help her to do “best in all things.” In the spring of 1940 when a young William Styron took to his bed with a painful earache, his father fi lled in that day’s entry for him, as Styron noted in the margin “this written by mon pere.” Even an earache, the elder Styron suggested, should not prevent the youngster from satisfying his daily obligation. For the Styrons, the Wanamaker Diary was as good a place as any to begin a lifelong habit that instilled discipline and tracked one’s accomplishments whether at home or at school. Neither father nor son seemed to care that the bottom of each diary page was edged with “Beauty Tips,” “Guides to Weight Loss,” “Etiquette guides,” and other pieces of advertising-laced advice.20 As long as Styron was writing in his diary and presumably absorbing some of messages, Wanamaker may have felt his diary had succeeded on a retail level. The Wanamaker Diary introduced the Wanamaker name and vision into people’s homes, even though there was no guarantee how they might interpret it once it arrived there. Although they might never make it to the real Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia or New York, these diary users could feel as if they had walked through the aisles, witnessed the holiday spectacles in the Grand Court, and smelled the perfume

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wafting from the cosmetics counter. It did not matter where they lived. It could be fi fty to one hundred miles from the nearest urban center, perhaps more. It gave them access to a world they felt they, too, could partake in whatever their means. Even diarists such as Styron and Moffat who carried on the traditions of the past in their entries could not help but betray how shopping had come to shape their daily lives. For many, shopping trips dictated the arrangement of their days and their social calendars. They wrote about heading to town for a new dress, meeting a friend at Wanamaker’s for tea, or browsing the “downtown” shops for a good sale. The Wanamaker Diary worked in concert with this trend, condoning the kind of behavior some critics, such as Thorstein Veblen writing in his Theory of the Leisure Class, may have abhorred.21 It gave its users permission: permission to spend, to move, to choose, and to enjoy all that this age of abundance had to offer. It was evident in the way they traveled about so readily in their new automobiles, routinely riding upwards of thirty miles to sightsee or shop. A taste for such freedoms naturally led to making other brave life choices, such as in the case of Moffat pursuing a career instead of a family. The Wanamaker Diary did not make all of this possible, but it was well suited for this generation of diarists, for the ones willing to embrace all that it preached. Take, for instance, Mrs. Frace, a widow who lived with her two daughters, both schoolteachers, in Easton, Pennsylvania, not far from Allentown. Without fail, Frace began each entry in her 1932 Wanamaker Diary with the weather report. Except on August 18, when she noted at the top of the day’s entry that it was “Dollar Day in Easton.” When it came to a sale, the weather would just have to wait. Such an opportunity for savings may not have achieved top billing in every Wanamaker Diary, but Frace’s note does illustrate the prominent role consumption could play in any number of Wanamaker annuals. F. J. Henry may have been carrying his 1924 Wanamaker Diary with him when he bought an “emblem pin” for $4 at Wyckoff’s Department Store in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, for he slipped the receipt inside for safekeeping. In 1932, another widow, this one residing in upstate New York, congratulated herself in her Wanamaker Diary when she noted that she got a free “Electric clock as premium with Comalt” on a shopping expedition to Chatham. Even though her husband was battling a terrible “cancer” at the “University Hospital,” a Philadelphia woman took the time to note in her Wanamaker

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Figure 5.2. A widow living near Chatham, New York, recorded in her 1932 Wana maker Diary that she and a friend received an “Electric clock as a premium with Comalt.” Author’s collection.

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Diary that it was her son “Bertie’s” twenty-fi rst birthday and that his dying father had given him a “watch.” 22 At twenty, Margaret Moffat still sounded like a giddy teenager when she recorded this fruitful weekend outing into Philadelphia in September 1918: Met Mother downtown & bought a velvet dress—my hearts’ desire for so long—then had lunch & went to Miss Hartman’s for shampoo. No money left so walked home.

Although Moffat did not mention where she found the dress, she could have purchased it at Wanamaker’s where she often lunched with friends. Another trip to Wanamaker’s was a bit more vexing because she arrived “just as closing so I could not buy Dick’s card . . . saw B & he brought me home in car. Saved 10c but no card for Dick & no sweater for mother.” 23 Such entries brought together might lead one to think that these lives revolved around spending, that they were consumed with consuming. That was not the case. They worked, they baked, they cleaned, they raised children. But when they did spend money on something grandiose like a “velvet dress,” they were more inclined to mention it than many of their diary predecessors. Such things had achieved a status in their lives and made the acquisition worth noting in their Wanamaker Diaries. It did not mean they abandoned old habits or old values connected to the daily exercise. The diary allowed them to do both: maintain habits of regularity and order that connected them with diary keepers of the past while acknowledging new desires like a “velvet dress.” With all of the goods on display right there in the printed annual, these entries might have been their way of acknowledging that they had made their choice, affi rming their own individual taste. For Umholtz, it was Brownhill and Kramer hosiery rather than Luxite Silk Lingerie. For Moffat, it was a plush “velvet dress.” They personalized the material vision Wanamaker had laid out for them. The Wanamaker Diary was more than just a compilation of ads, however. It included foldout city maps, theater seating charts, and “Points of Interest” pages that left readers, especially those living in sleepy towns outside New York and Philadelphia, with the unmistakable impression that there was a wider world beyond their front stoops awaiting discov-

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ery. It gave them a taste of the big city. But rather than pouting about what they might be missing, they absorbed its expansive attitude and sought their own sources of amusement. Although the upstate New York winters could be long and lonesome, a Chatham widow could always look forward to spring, such as the “Beautiful day” in May she “went to Hudson and Rinebeck with Mrs. Este [and] got a new hat [for] 2.00 had a fi ne time.” At the back of her 1908 Wanamaker Diary on a page reserved for “Household Receipts,” Margaret Twist confessed that she had managed to see no fewer than forty plays that year, recording in detail the name of the play, the theater, and the date. Others thought nothing of traveling miles to the New Jersey shore or the Poconos. For instance, William Apgor of Audobon, New Jersey, “read till noon” one Sunday in the spring of 1931, then “We 3 took a roaming trip cross countrywise through Merchantville.” Of course, it helped that many of these diarists owned or knew someone who owned an automobile. Frace, who lived in Easton, Pennsylvania, recorded one memorable outing in April 1932 when “we went auto riding with Detweilers to Doylestown in museum & on way home stopped at ‘Red Pig’ restaurant & got barbecue sandwiches & coffee.” 24 A Wanamaker’s executive surely would have been disappointed that Frace’s party failed to make it all the way down to Philadelphia that day for a visit to the store. Nevertheless, Frace and others who participated in such entertainments were getting out and getting around, which was something the Wanamaker Diary appeared to underwrite in its very design. The Wanamaker Diary instructed its owners how to enrich their lives. Although its approach was primarily material, some took the lesson far beyond matters of consumption. For some such as Emma Umholtz, her choices may have been limited to deciding in favor of a granite baking dish instead of the luxurious, silver-plated version. But the alternatives presented by the variety of the Wanamaker Diary’s material display encouraged others to consider the many choices open to them in other realms, both political and social. Take these passages, for instance, that Frace recorded after a busy Saturday in October 1932: “Girls went down town in morn,” “Emilie got a green dress at Jerome’s,” and “Lillie got a dark green coat trimmed with Krimmer fur at Laubach’s.” But that was not all, for later that evening “Emilie & I registered at polls,” the two women obviously intent on choosing their presidential candidate come November. On November 8, Frace wrote: “Emilie voted on way to school. I went up in morn. We both voted for Hoover. Roosevelt

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democrat won by a big majority. Roosevelt carried southern & boundary states & New York. Hoover carried New England & Penna.” 25 These women could fi nally express themselves in the voting booth as well as in the department store. Moffat also recorded many bold choices in the march of years her Wanamaker Diaries witnessed. She routinely acknowledged the changes she saw in herself as she grew from an adolescent into a young woman. On a cash accounts page in her 1913 diary, she enumerated the “Changes in 1913 wrought in Me” as she turned sixteen. “Outward,” she saw “Long dresses. Hair up. a little self-pride—I still need more to make myself appear decent among others. A desire to talk intelligent.” “Inward,” she sensed “A strong desire to do right & receive reward. No desire to play foolish games. The feeling you have when you really and truly love something or one. I feel I have a better grip on my tongue but Oh! I can only mention this—improvement vastly needed.” Moffat also came to realize something else about herself, as she made quite clear in an entry she recorded one Sunday in 1916: “To church alone Helen H. there—Very much enthused about her wedding—I can’t feel with her.” At nineteen and having just graduated, Moffat could not entirely envision what her future might look like, but she did not think it included marriage. After an “awful” scrap with her mother who complained that she was “no help at home,” Moffat “determine[d] then & there to get a job.” Initially, Moffat found work at a “plant” and by the end of the year was working at a company called “Ridgeway” for a man named “Masucci.” As she opened her diary for 1919, she marveled: Another new year—what changes will it bring forth? So many changes last year—who ever thought last year this time I would be sitting in my own home in W. Phila. Very unbelievable! . . . Jack McGrann here for dinner. Was to have had Pete but he could not come. Mr. Brown calls in aft. & we all go to the movies—Good fun—Jack would have liked to very much but deemed it best not to do it. I do love to do things I’m not supposed to do. Very wayward if given half the chance. Jack is a peach.

Moffat grew up to be a very independent woman and throughout her life remained unmarried, true to herself, and faithful to the Wanamaker Diary. 26 It’s no wonder she remained so loyal to her little red book and continued to use one into her seventies. After all, it taught her how to dress, how to think, how to choose, and perhaps even how to live.

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Women such as Moffat or Frace were full of “inarticulate longings,” yearning for a host of things she “wants . . . but doesn’t know it yet.” At least that was how many advertisers viewed their female audience: like a spring just waiting to be tapped. 27 The Wanamaker Diary gave these women a voice and allowed them to articulate and realize those longings, whether they be material, political, social, or physical. By putting their own words inside its commercial cover, they inserted themselves in that material dream world of Wanamaker’s invention. But each made it her own, adapting Wanamaker’s sermon to suit her own pocketbook as well as her own desires. The Wanamaker Diary remained popular with users such as Moffat and continued to be stacked on store counters during the holiday rush into the 1970s. In 1961, Fred Yost, Wanamaker’s promotions manager, wrote a representative of the direct mail agency Woodward and Lothrop that the “100th anniversary edition with its historical squibs has been enthusiastically received, and I am told, is selling like hotcakes.” Yost received many thanks for the dozens of promotional copies of the Wanamaker Diary he distributed that year. At least 125 went to the wives of members of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. According to one of the recipients, “Those diaries made a hit—a big hit, and will help to have Wanamakers remembered well in every home—even ours.” William J. McCaughan noted that seeing the Wanamaker Diary “was like meeting an old friend.” Another Yost business associate, Howard Kratz, thought the edition “beautifully compiled” and admitted that “Already the ‘Golden Book’ has become my Desk Secretary, noting memoranda to guide my movements through the new 1961.”28 These users embraced the Wanamaker Diary as enthusiastically as their predecessors did and appeared oblivious, or untroubled, by its commercial cloak. For those still mystified by the appeal of an advertising diary, consider, too, that the Wanamaker Diary was cheap, subsidized by the advertisements sharing the space between its pasteboard covers. For some, it surely came down to a matter of cost. The diary’s sticker price remained a fraction of the fancier volumes displayed in any stationery store. But it was much more than that. Single or married, city dweller or country bumpkin, diarists enjoyed being part of Wanamaker’s virtual community. Even if she was not a Wanamaker customer, it identified her as modern, as an American willing to embrace a world connected and suffused with merchandise. Her diary could help her manage it with convenience and minimal daily effort.

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At the moment Wanamaker introduced his unique diary brand, consumption had become an intricate part of American culture, woven inextricably into the fabric of daily life. That may account for why the Wanamaker Diary was so well received among Wanamaker’s middle-class customers. For some, diary keeping became as much a daily practice as going to the market or heading “down town” to shop. The pairing was so natural and seamless it made sense to associate the two as Wanamaker had in his advertising-rich receptacle. Critics may have found this combination even more troubling than the intrusion of advertisements into literary magazines since diaries suggested an intimacy about them, a private space even more sacrosanct than the home. But they were operating under a misconception, for the diary had long exhibited strong links to the world of goods as early as the nation’s founding. Remember Aitken’s Register, the eighteenth-century diary designed with the businessman in mind. Wanamaker simply built on this commercial foundation to produce a diary that announced what many diarists had already figured out: diary keeping and spending went well together. *

*

*

To Wanamaker’s admirers, the Wanamaker Diary was a brilliant stroke, the latest in the mogul’s advertising innovations not unlike his early adoption of full-page advertisements in the city’s newspapers. Customers might toss aside a catalog at the end of a season, but the Wanamaker Diary would remain on her desk for the entire year. Each time she opened the diary to record the day’s happenings she could not help but notice all that Wanamaker’s had to offer. Taking the brand loyalty of the Standard Diaries a step further, the Wanamaker Diary engendered store loyalty, signaling that the user was a devoted Wanamaker shopper. Critics of mass consumption may have seen it differently. To them, exploiting the diary as a vehicle for advertising was a travesty, a betrayal of an American diary-keeping tradition born out of a quest for discipline, regularity, and thrift. Rather than introduce his customers to the benefits of diary keeping, Wanamaker and his not-so-veiled pitch for mass consumption pulled an expanding middle class into an endless and empty cycle of getting and spending. 29 The intrusion of ads into the pages of the daily planner was just another degradation ushered in by an era of frenzied consuming. The Wanamaker Diary was a direct result of the trends that shaped

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Figure 5.3. An advertising card, typical of the era, for Wana maker’s fi rst clothing store, known to locals in Philadelphia simply as Oak Hall. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

the development of the American daily planner. Between its pasteboard covers, it brought together all of those themes that had played a role in the evolution of the printed diary. Mass-produced, one Wanamaker Diary was exactly the same as any other. It was inexpensive, thanks in part to the insertion of paid advertising. Yet it exuded an air of refi nement and respectability, not least because it was associated with the reputable

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Wanamaker who made much of his efforts to “educate” his clientele. It broadened the appeal of diary keeping to a new class of users, some of them fi rst-generation Americans. Finally, its blatantly commercial character acknowledged the central role commerce had always played in encouraging more people to write on a daily basis. The appearance of the Wanamaker Diary affi rmed that diary keeping and consumption were intricately linked and that commerce, because of its daily accounting demands, may have nudged as many people to their pens as did concerns about God or soul. As much as Wanamaker liked to sell himself as an innovator in the realm of advertising, he was a great mimic and was not above adopting promotional schemes no matter the source. In 1861, he named his fi rst store the Oak Hall Clothing Bazaar, imitating the name of a popular Boston men’s shop. He modeled its interior after A. T. Stewart’s in New York City, whose sumptuous display counters and abundant sales help appealed especially to women. He offered money-back guarantees and claimed to have invented a one-price system that other retailers had used for years. Wanamaker’s tactics even landed him in a scrap with Mark Twain when Wanamaker decided to enter the competitive world of the post–Civil War book market. Claiming the peddlers who sold books by subscription were unscrupulous, Wanamaker defended his right to sell the volumes without the publisher’s permission. Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, happened to be a partner in Charles L. Webster, Inc., a publisher that had acquired the rights to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. When Webster’s found out Wanamaker had purchased five hundred copies of the memoirs and planned to sell them in his book department, the company took him to court. Wanamaker won his case as well as a tongue-lashing from Twain. Accusing him of robbing Mrs. Grant of her pension, Twain called Wanamaker “that unco-pious butter-mouthed Sunday school-slobbering sneak-thief John Wanamaker, now of Philadelphia, presently of hell.”30 With Wanamaker’s knack for imitation, it should come as no surprise that the Wanamaker Diary was not wholly original. However, in the case of the Wanamaker Diary, Wanamaker and his publicity department might have been reluctant to admit they were following in the footsteps of hawkers of patent medicine who had appropriated the American almanac as an advertising medium as early as the 1850s. Patent medicine men ushered in many of the trends that changed the look and approach of American advertising. Besides running columns of hype in newspa-

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pers in every state and territory, patent medicine men bought pages at the backs of new novels or in mail-order catalogs. They practically invented the roadside sign. They offered pill-fi lled paperweights and decorative porcelain to loyal customers. With the aid of lithography, they created posters that could be mistaken—especially by the humbler classes—for art. Many spent thousands of dollars each year printing up their own pamphlets customers could pick up at drugstore counters. These pitches came in the guise of cookbooks, joke books, coloring books, songbooks, and trade cards. Harlan Page Hubbard, an advertising agent for Lydia Pinkham’s best-selling Vegetable Compound, claimed in the 1880s to be sending out circulars at a rate of three tons a day for distribution by druggists. 31 They’d stop at nothing to boost sales of their alcohol-steeped elixirs. That included publishing their own diaries. As early as the 1820s, a few ads appeared here and there for patent medicines in regional almanacs. But it was not until the 1850s that the cure-promising hucksters began printing almanacs and diaries all their own. 32 They contained everything one might expect to fi nd in an almanac: astrology, calendars, humorous essays, poetry, and weather predictions. They then added testimonials, medical essays, and bogus statistics to bolster their claims. Much of the content, though couched in a familiar genre, was geared toward getting across the benefits of a particular brand. It might be Hostetter’s Bitters, Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, or Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery. After the Civil War when the cost of printing plummeted thanks to the spread of steam-press technology, these almanacs became enormously popular among patent medicine purveyors and their customers. In 1889, not yet at its peak almanac production, James Ayer’s publishing plant printed 100,000 a day in twenty-one languages, never allowing something as trivial as a language barrier to restrict sales among the nation’s burgeoning immigrant population. Perhaps their strongest selling point was that they were free, a giveaway that masked the price consumers may have paid in other, more subconscious, ways, especially if they were persuaded to shell out the money for a remedy the almanac was promoting. 33 Not all of the patent medicine almanacs doubled as diaries, but those that did sparked a trend that inspired John Wanamaker and many entrepreneurs who followed him. Just think of the American Express Diary or the New Yorker Desk Calendar. These apparently modern schemes that even today help build and sustain a company’s brand image owe a great deal to those P. T. Barnums of the patent medicine world. Dr. Ray

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Vaughn Pierce, of Buffalo, New York, built a veritable empire on the sales of his Golden Medical Discovery, a tonic said to conquer any and all “throat, bronchial and lung complications.” The only “medicine man” to give Lydia Pinkham a run for her money, Pierce drew thousands of devotees to his six-story World’s Dispensary and later his Invalid Hotel in downtown Buffalo. In 1872, Pierce distributed the fi rst of many Pierce’s Memorandum and Account Book designed for Farmers, Mechanics and All People. Billed as a “present from the People’s Medical Servant,” the pocket-sized almanac was available free at any druggist or mailed to any address “on receipt of one postage stamp.” It promoted Pierce’s medicines and provided ruled blank pages for those “who appreciate the value of keeping a memorandum of business transactions, daily events, and other items of interest or importance, for future reference.” Soon those blank pages were converted into dated spaces for diary entries. Charlie Miller used Pierce’s Memorandum and Account Book to keep track of his schoolwork as well as to copy the defi nitions of proper versus common nouns. A lightly educated farmer, John Emory listed in his Pierce’s everything he had accomplished one week in March 1883, including “plod the loot, fused it out and hosed it . . . cutting down the apple tree five cents worth . . . moed the weads off the clover moed the clover.” In 1898, someone had used Pierce’s diary to note the dimensions of a poplar tree he had just cut down. Into the 1930s, Pierce’s Memorandum Books proved useful for plenty of folks who found space there for their accounts, addresses, grocery lists, reminders, and other random matter. 34 Pierce had succeeded in creating a marketing tool that people readily welcomed into their homes and was a daily reminder of the benefits of Dr. Pierce’s personal remedies. Few entrepreneurs could ignore such a powerful device and advertising opportunity. Certainly not John Wanamaker. Wanamaker sealed the marriage of daily planner and sales vehicle by taking it further than even the patent medicine men dared. He did not stop at one product. He wasn’t just hawking liver pills or cures for halitosis. He was selling customers on an entire store or way of life. The Wanamaker Diary offered all those shiny, new things that promised middleclass Americans a life of comfort and ease, such as a mahogany bedroom set, gleaming white appliances, or rust-proof brassieres. As a religious man, Wanamaker did not see a contradiction between a life of mass consumption and one undergirded by Christian values. The two pursuits

Figure 5.4. In 1872, Dr. Ray Vaughn Pierce, of Buffalo, New York, published the fi rst of many Pierce’s Memorandum and Account Books, a patent medicine almanac hawking his Golden Medical Discovery said to conquer any and all “throat, bronchial and lung complications.” Author’s collection.

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were not mutually exclusive, according to Wanamaker. He believed in what he was selling and did not feel it corrupted Americans to live a better life through Wanamaker’s merchandise. 35 Wanamaker managed to change the daily planner for good by beating the patent medicine men at their own game. He did what his notorious brethren could not: he made the advertising diary respectable. The diary’s design was critical in this regard, but it also came down to attitude and reputation. Wanamaker was respected, even revered, as an educator and public servant. He was a man you could trust, according to his publicity team. Wanamaker’s promotions were continually couched in terms of cultivating the tastes of his diverse clientele. He made his customers feel comfortable recording the details of their private lives in a repository so steeped in the business of selling that it practically opened their wallets for them. From then on, few Americans would raise an eyebrow at this new class of commercial diary that “sold” diarists on the benefits of one thing or another on a daily basis. That was Wanamaker’s achievement. Still, it took Wanamaker some years, nearly forty after opening his fi rst clothing store, to introduce the Wanamaker Diary. In the early years Wanamaker relied heavily on newspaper advertising but experimented with a host of other strategies to get people into his stores. Like his patent medicine counterparts, he printed tons of copy in the form of booklets, leaflets, and small magazines. He purchased space at the top of every page in Philadelphia’s city directory. He even installed clocks in the city’s railroad stations and other public places that displayed the initials “W & B” for Wanamaker & Brown (his brother-in-law and early partner). Before he opened his Grand Depot in 1876, he loaned out the colossal hall, a former rail station far from the city of Philadelphia’s shopping district, for an evangelical revival to get people accustomed to traveling to that section of town. Wanamaker believed in advertising no matter whether business was up or down. “You want to get the people in to see what you have to sell, and you must advertise to do that,” he wrote. “When the times are good they will come of their own accord.” Wanamaker never apologized for the pervasiveness or tenacity of his advertising and, in later years, accepted countless awards and took much credit for his supposed innovations. 36 For instance, he claimed that his plain talk advertisements were “epochal” since “such a thing had never been done before.”37 Wanamaker never stopped looking for new ways to en-

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tice his customers. The Wanamaker Diary debuted in the year 1900, and the timing, both for Wanamaker and for his customers, was significant. At the opening of the new century, though the nation’s pundits might not have agreed on its effects, few would deny the existence of a new consumer culture. As one historian described it, this culture consisted of a national marketplace of goods, an emerging class of urban professionals, and a “new gospel of therapeutic release” that justified the purchase of material goods like never before. Some contended that banks, corporations, and manufacturers all conspired to fuel this beast intent on loading Americans up with goods, no matter whether they needed them or not. Wanamaker himself coined this brave new world the “Land of Desire.” Although it had its detractors, such as Veblen writing in his Theory of the Leisure Class, many Americans who could afford it, and even some who could not, welcomed this new attitude toward buying. 38 In particular, Veblen singled out a new “leisure class” for its “conspicuous consumption” of material goods, a preoccupation designed to set themselves apart from the lower orders of society. Veblen wrote: Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life. 39

In other words, such behavior was wasteful and harmful to industry. Despite the scathing critiques, Wanamaker and his customers viewed this material abundance as the fulfi llment of American progress. At the same time, a new breed of advertising men began to reinforce these “fables of abundance” in more sophisticated ways than those early promoters of patent medicine.40 Advertising had grown up and become professional, leaving behind the swift-talking salesmen whose promotions were little more than thinly veiled falsehoods. In 1889, Charles Pinkham, who had taken over the production and marketing of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound upon his mother’s death, replaced his old-time advertising agent with a pince-nez-donning gentleman by the name of James T. Wetherald. A conservatively attired executive of the Pettengill Agency of Boston, Wetherald promised Pinkham that he would revive the popularity of his mother’s remedy by making

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it more respectable. Although he continued the company’s commitment to newspaper advertising, Wetherald created a series of etiquette books that simultaneously promoted the benefits of Pinkham’s potions. Methods began to change along with personnel. At least one trade paper began to ask whether the advertising almanac had become passé. These socalled Pinkham guides were aimed at a high-brow audience even though Wetherald knew full well that Pinkham’s clientele was primarily middle class. Wetherald preferred to work on creating demand than responding to need. By 1900, Pinkham had put Wetherald on salary as the company’s fi rst advertising manager.41 Wanamaker, too, hired a professional to direct his company’s advertising and marketing into the new century. Unlike Wetherald, Joseph Appel did not come from one of the many advertising agencies that grew out of this thriving consumer culture. Appel was a newspaperman. But he had a knack for publicity and for transforming the commonplace into a potent sales vehicle. In fact, that was how he landed the job at Wanamaker’s. As Appel himself recalled in a 1938 address to business historians, he was reading over a copy of the Philadelphia Times that he had “just put to press” when an idea struck him. His eye was caught by a Wanamaker’s advertisement “with a banner head across the top.” Appel went on: why not make it read: “Wanamaker’s Daily News”? Make up the page like a newspaper—a newspaper of the store? Why not? Isn’t a store a little world? Why not tell its news? . . . Next day I wrote a letter—closing with “kindly reply at your earliest convenience.” The reply was prompt. “Come and see me,” signed John Wanamaker. Two days later I said goodbye to the Times and became an advertising writer in a great store.

Appel joined the retail fi rm in 1899 and had soon installed a newspaper press “on the store’s main aisle” to turn out a daily edition of the “Silver Anniversary News” in recognition of the “New Kind of Store’s” twentyfive years in business.42 With his propensity for seeing the advertising potential in something as deceptively humdrum as a daily paper, Appel likely had a hand in the design and execution of the Wanamaker Diary. The fi rst Wanamaker Diary appeared just after Appel’s arrival in Wanamaker’s publicity department. It made sense that Wanamaker would turn to an outsider to run his

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advertising campaigns. That way he could distance himself from the schemes employed to sell patent medicines. Many of the fi rst generation of advertising professionals cut their teeth pushing patent medicine, as one veteran observed: “the greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field.” These were the kind of men who boasted that they could “advertise dish water, and sell it, just as well as an article of merit.” But Wanamaker had something different in mind. He sought to uplift public taste and saw every advertisement as critical to his campaign. He once wrote that his “idea of advertising is much higher than merely to sell goods. It is to educate our own people and, to some extent, whoever reads what is upon our page.” When Wanamaker made such claims, he echoed the sentiments of many of his contemporaries who countered critics by casting advertising as progressive, a virtual public service. Responding to critics who bemoaned the introduction of ads into the editorial pages of literary magazines, editor Frank Munsey, who depended on advertising for his magazine’s survival, argued that advertisements kept the reader “in touch with progress, with the trend of prices, with inventions and improvements.” That is one reason, Wanamaker explained, that he was “just as particular about an advertisement as the Pennsylvania Railroad Company is to run its trains on schedule.” To that end, he directed Appel and his staff to avoid dishonesty at all costs. “Your sole business as a writer of our advertising,” he wrote, “is to fi nd out the truth regarding the merchandise and to tell it in plain words as briefly as you can.” No matter how large and unwieldy his commercial empire became, Wanamaker continued to take an interest in the company’s advertising messages.43 So while Appel or one of his underlings may have instigated the Wanamaker Diary, there was no question that Wanamaker left his mark on every page. Aside from national trends such as rising mass consumption and the professionalization of advertising, there was much in John Wanamaker’s own circumscribed world to account for why the Wanamaker Diary appeared when it did. The 1890s was a tough decade for retailers, and Wanamaker was no exception. The Panic of 1893 brought several years of depression that spelled high unemployment and paltry sales. Wanamaker managed to survive by buying conservatively and downscaling where he could. But it did not help matters that Wanamaker was distracted for much of the decade by politics, serving as postmaster general in the Harrison administration and later initiating a run for Pennsylvania governor.

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After fighting a bitter campaign he lost to a machine politician in 1898, Wanamaker abandoned politics and renewed his attention to his store. What he saw was a “queer old patchwork building,” a once–Grand Depot whose debut had coincided with America’s centennial that had by the late 1890s lost much of its charm. Its liabilities became only more apparent by the damage it suffered in a fi re that ripped through Market Street in 1896. Although much of the building was spared, Wanamaker realized the risk it posed to the thousands who worked and shopped there. The former Pennsylvania Railroad station encompassed two acres but had only eight exits and featured a decorative glass window along the roof that could shatter in a fi re. Furthermore, while Wanamaker played politics in Washington, his competitors, including Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Gimbel’s in Philadelphia, were building new stores, skyscraping edifices that typified modern architectural design and made his single-story depot look all the more musty and old-fashioned.44 Wanamaker’s store as well as his image needed sprucing up. But Wanamaker soon discovered that his vision and the new store that would embody it could not be realized overnight. Wanamaker tapped Daniel H. Burnham of Chicago, the architect responsible for Marshall Field’s new home, to design it, and the planning began at the opening of the new century. It would stand on the site of the Grand Depot but extend farther into the sky and deeper into the ground. They would have to dig into solid bedrock to provide a fi rm enough foundation to support the massive structure. It would be constructed of marble drawn from quarries in Maine and held together with wide steel beams. “This kind of construction for strength, fi re-proofi ng, conveniences, and other accommodations for the public must necessarily be slower than common building,” Wanamaker reasoned, though even he may not have realized at the outset how much slower that might mean. Construction began in April 1904. The work was done in three phases so that a portion of the store could remain open throughout the rebuilding. The new Wanamaker’s, a building that would become as famous in Philadelphia as Independence Hall, was dedicated in December 1911.45 From design to completion, Wanamaker’s structural vision took ten years to fulfi ll. Luckily, Wanamaker did not have to wait any time at all to achieve a restoration on paper. The Wanamaker Diary could begin the work a refurbished Wanamaker’s would eventually do for the customers who walked through its doors and stepped inside its Grand Court. All of

Figure 5.5. Wana maker’s Grand Court would become famous for its sumptuous counter displays, courteous sales assistants, and holiday spectacles, themes Wana maker had already imbued in his daily planner. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

those values Wanamaker hoped to impart with the elaborate counter displays, the courteous sales attendants, the bronze centennial eagle, and the holiday spectacles could be accomplished immediately on the pages of the diary. Steeped with advertisements that mirrored the department store’s retail splendor, the Wanamaker Diary exuded Wanamaker’s own brand of civic virtue, education, and commitment to indi-

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vidual taste. Wanamaker may have stolen this advertising template from what he would have called a bunch of unscrupulous hucksters, but he intended to legitimize it. He refi ned the almanac-diary and converted it into a paper version of his retailing vision. Wanamaker infused the Wanamaker Diary with the same sense of civic responsibility that he hoped to convey in his grand department store, located only a block from City Hall. Every Wanamaker Diary contained seating charts of the city’s most popular public venues, including the Metropolitan Opera House, the Walnut Street Theatre, Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania, and, of course, the Egyptian Hall in the new John Wanamaker store. The 1913 Wanamaker Diary included a list of public events in the coming year, and a blurb acknowledging the anniversary of the fi rst penny savings bank of Philadelphia. Every year the diary also was accompanied by a detailed city map attached to the inside back cover. Never ones to miss a promotional opportunity, the store’s ad executives always made sure the map included a little something extra on the fl ip side such as the “car and bus routes to Wanamaker’s” or a “Chronology of the Wanamaker Business.” The diary’s opening pages contained an index to the volume’s advertisers. It could have been mistaken for a city directory.46 All that was missing was the street index. Wanamaker’s strategy was not unlike Aitken’s, who sought to produce a reference customers could not do without. The only difference was that each time someone opened the Wanamaker Diary to view a seating chart or consult the city map her eye may have rested for a moment on any of the countless ads strategically bound with its useful content. In addition to being a good citizen, Wanamaker also considered himself an educator. As early as 1858, Wanamaker founded a Sunday School called Bethany that grew to become the largest in the nation. He was a great proponent and supporter of the Sunday School movement, which preached self-improvement and economic uplift in conjunction with its more religious principles. He carried over this teacherly attitude into his store and his diary. In a treatise on what he called “The Wanamaker System,” Wanamaker believed he was aiding consumption by “cultivating popular taste.” The Wanamaker system, he explained, “has popularized literature by its book-prices. It has popularized art by its exhibits of pictures and its store decorations. It has popularized music by putting music and musical instruments closer to the homes of the people.” The Wanamaker Diary extended this approach in ad copy that sounded occa-

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sionally like Sunday School lessons. Rather than introduce with a brand name, an advertisement for shoes was titled “A little talk on shoes.” A lead-in for the “Wanamaker Special Watch” delivered a brief treatise on the concept of accuracy. This is how Wanamaker broached the topic of office furniture: Business life has grown vastly more strenuous since Harriett Beecher Stowe printed this warning: “Unless men and women make a conscience, a religion of saving and sparing something of themselves, especially for home life and home consumption, it must follow that home will often be merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and irritable.” Save something of yourself! You can do it even in business by having comfortable, systematic business furniture—the kind that saves fret at the office and reaction at home.

Many of these advertisements were signed “John Wanamaker” as if he were bestowing the advice across the back fence rather than through the impersonal medium of print.47 But why a diary? Wanamaker could have accomplished the same goals in a catalog or some other medium. Wanamaker had previously published a Dictionary of Philadelphia with a map of the city and its environs as well as an “alphabetically arranged descriptive index and guide to places, institutions, societies, amusements, resorts, etc., in and about the city of Philadelphia.”48 Such a volume served the same public service as the city data in his diary could. Why combine these elements— advertising and reference matter—with a daily diary? The answer was both personal and professional. Don’t forget Wanamaker himself was a diarist. He started and stopped the daily habit countless times throughout his life whether he was at home or abroad. He knew its benefits well, both as an account book of the soul and the pocketbook, even if he did not always meet its daily demands. After sitting in on a particularly rousing sermon, Wanamaker remarked in his diary that “this year then thou shall die. Oh Lord may I live in readiness.”49 Taking a daily reading of one’s duties and actions was a practice Wanamaker, as an evangelical Christian and Sunday School teacher, would have been eager to encourage among his brethren as well as his customers. Wanamaker once wrote that he considered his stores a pulpit that he hoped would have “an influence for good . . .

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as well as profit on the business side.”50 The same could be said of his diary. Wanamaker also claimed to be committed to the concept of the individual and his or her own taste. While the Grand Depot was limited in size and focused on appealing to middle-class consumers, Wanamaker’s new store delivered twenty times the selling space. That allowed Wanamaker to broaden his merchandise to include higher- and lower-class clientele. At his Astor Place store in New York City, Wanamaker reproduced a $250,000 Fifth Avenue mansion, calling it “The House Palatial.” For those with more modest incomes, there was the home furnishings department known as “The Little House that Budget Built.” Wanamaker’s had something for everyone, a message he carried over into the Wanamaker Diary. Advertisements for pricey silk lingerie or silverplated chafi ng dishes were followed by a full-page ad for coal or a sewing machine, items of necessity rather than luxury. 51 The diary format reinforced the message that Wanamaker cared about the individual customer and her unique needs. It allowed the user to personalize and refi ne her taste in the diary section and budget for purchases in the cash accounts pages. More than a pen-and-ink embodiment of Wanamaker’s retail vision, the Wanamaker Diary was a reflection of the man himself. It was an extension of the character he had cultivated throughout his career and sought to update with the rebirth of his stores. Call it a sort of modern folksiness. First there was the traditional John Wanamaker, the man who maintained that he was just a simple country merchant no matter how large his empire became. It was an image he carefully maintained, as he admitted, “The buying public never for a moment forgets it is dealing with John Wanamaker instead of a cold, impersonal institution.” For that reason, the Wanamaker Diary was rife with nostalgia. Its designers never missed an opportunity to place the Wanamaker Diary within a long and supposedly historical view of diary keeping. Title pages often relied on illustrations of Colonial-era men and women posed at their writing desks quill in hand, linking it with diary-keeping’s and Philadelphia’s genteel past. 52 And the name of Samuel Pepys, the renowned English diarist, was invoked frequently in the Wanamaker annuals. In 1925, a sketch of Pepys appeared on the title page with this memorial: “Samuel Pepys, whose famous diary is the source of much valuable historical information, was born in England, February 23rd, 1633, died

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Figure 5.6. The title pages of the Wana maker Diary, seen here and on pages 236–38, were steeped in nostalgic, and romanticized, views of diary keeping’s past. Author’s collection.

May 26th, 1703. [Signed] John Wanamaker Philadelphia.” Wanamaker even used Pepys’s legacy to sell sheet music. Under the headline “Songs That Win” in a 1905 Wanamaker Diary, an advertisement, once again signed by John Wanamaker, noted that: Pepys’s Diary is full of unconscious revelations. Thus he gives a glimpse of his politeness when he tells of an entertainment where he heard a young lady

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sing of whom he records: “It was enough to make any man sick to hear her, yet I was forced to commend her highly.” Songs that win honest applause by deserving it, in the Music Store; in bound volumes or in sheet form. 53

Not only did such material promote Wanamaker’s image as a man who subscribed to traditional values, it may have persuaded those who used his diaries into thinking they were participating in some refi ned cultural practice. Despite his passion for tradition, Wanamaker also sought recognition for his commitment to progress. That fl ip side of Wanamaker was re-

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flected in his buildings and his diary. Wanamaker recruited an architect who would guarantee his new edifice had the most state-of-the-art appearance and utilize the latest building technology, even though he received much criticism because Burnham was not a Philadelphia native. For his diary he also capitalized on the latest technologies—this time of printing—to set it apart from those fl imsy giveaways piled high on drugstore counters. The Wanamaker Diary had the look of a fi ne hardbound

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novel, maybe even Shakespeare or a collection of British poetry, sporting a rich-looking—deep red and shiny—cloth cover with the diary name and year embossed in bold black letters along the binding. Inside, the leaves were shiny and slick giving the pages, especially those that contained advertising messages, the appearance of high quality. Aside from appearing modern, the Wanamaker Diary looked original, as if no one had ever offered customers a diary like this before. For instance, appended to the “daily expenses” pages was a section on “In-

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comes and Budget,” a little primer for diary users on a retailer’s most self-serving topics including “How to budget,” “How to buy,” and “How to pay.” Such an approach implied that its user had never seen an account book before. In fact, the budgeting lesson turned out to be a poorly disguised promotion for a Wanamaker’s charge account. 54 Weaving advertising throughout the volume was equally ingenious, a revolutionary concept Wanamaker would have gladly taken credit for. Wanamaker may have scoffed at the idea that there was any connection whatsoever between his diary and those produced by patent medicine sellers. Even though he may have made this kind of diary respectable, Wanamaker was by no means its inventor. But you would never know it from looking at the diary itself. This was Wanamaker’s opportunity in print to convey his modernity, an attempt to update diary keeping for the modern age. Wanamaker welcomed the label traditional but he would have bristled at the term old-fashioned. His stores and his diary both had to remain in vogue. For all of his purported folksiness, Wanamaker was a very shrewd businessman. Even as early as 1860, Wanamaker had his eye on the future. That was the year he married Mary Brown, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphian by the name of Thomas Brown. The following year, Wanamaker opened his fi rst retail store with Mary’s brother, Nathan. Wanamaker’s alliance with the Brown family, not to mention its net worth, gave Wanamaker the fi nancial security other fledgling entrepreneurs lacked to weather those trying war years. Toward the end of his life Wanamaker overcame another fi nancial crisis, thanks in part to the insurance money he collected following a suspicious fi re that destroyed his Philadelphia country estate. 55 This calculating version of Wanamaker would never let an opportunity like the Wanamaker Diary pass him by if he thought for a moment those patent medicine men had developed a winning advertising formula. Wanamaker realized the power of the daily diary. It took his message into the most intimate spaces of the home and impressed itself upon the user every day. It was not like an advertising trade card that could be pasted into a scrapbook or placed in a box and forgotten about. It was not like a magazine that got shelved away as soon as it was read. The Wanamaker Diary was there all year long and had an extended shelf life. Every time someone picked it up to record a new entry Wanamaker had another chance to sell her some merchandise. Wanamaker expanded his vision to reach the widest possible audi-

ence. Like many of his contemporaries, Wanamaker instituted a bargain basement to appeal to working-class shoppers who could exit the subway and step directly into the discount showrooms below ground. Wanamaker’s department store went from lowbrow to highbrow in a matter of floors. On paper, Wanamaker hoped the diary’s gentility and respectability would attract those who had it in addition to those who wanted it, whether they were men or women. Although Wanamaker may have hoped his diary appealed equally to men and women, women appeared to use the diary more frequently than men. The 1913 edition of the Wanamaker Diary included pages to itemize “Engagements” and “Articles Loaned” and a “Personal Record” page that asked for one’s bust measurement, hosiery size, and other helpful data if one were shopping for a new outfit. In appreciation for a free diary the head of Wanamaker’s public relations department mailed him at the opening of 1961, Meyer Weckstein of New York wrote: Do you believe in E.S.P.? Five minutes ago I asked my secretary to buy a diary for Mrs. Weckstein to use at home. This is what I was asked for while having coffee at home this morning. Immediately thereafter I received a piece of mail from you and much to my surprise I found within it exactly what I asked for. Many, many thanks. I know that Mrs. Weckstein will enjoy using it very much.

Although Wanamaker was long dead by then, such words would have been music to his ears. 56 Unfortunately, there is no evidence in Wanamaker’s store archives to answer precisely how the Wanamaker Diary was born. Wanamaker may not have had as much a hand in it as he did in his newspaper advertisements for Oak Hall or his Grand Depot, but there was no question that he left his stamp on it. It was a Wanamaker product and evoked the same paradoxical combination of sophistication and down-home simplicity as did the store and the man. There is also little evidence regarding the diary’s circulation during the store’s peak, in the 1920s and 1930s, or for how much it sold. Nevertheless, we can infer a bit about the logistics of the diary’s production from the publication of a special edition of the Wanamaker Diary published on the occasion of the store’s one-hundredth anniversary in

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1961. Planning for the volume began as early as January 1960 among the store’s public relations staff. They decided on gold-coated paper for the cover, a suggestion of Fred Yost, the sales promotion manager, and considered printing as many as 100,000 copies. That number was scaled back in March to 15,000, after they realized that the store usually prints 10,000 diaries annually. As had been the case for previous Wanamaker Diaries, the cost of production would be reduced somewhat by selling ad space to outside fi rms for as much as $150 a page. All the usual reference matter would be included, such as the almanac and theater plans, though Yost suggested the seating charts be brought up to date. At the bottom of each diary page, a little saying or “Wanamaker fi rst” would be added to emphasize the fact that this was its anniversary issue. Negotiations began in July with the Ready Reference Publishing Company, which would print the annual including all its special features for $2,715. It sold for 50 cents, the sticker price underwritten by the sale of ads. The publicity department retained 1,000 copies to give away as promotional items, one of which made its way into the home of Meyer Weckstein. The Wanamaker Diary 100th Anniversary Edition went on sale at Thanksgiving and was prominently displayed at all of the store’s entrances. 57 This glimpse of one year in the production life of the Wanamaker Diary reveals the dual role advertising played in the store annual. Not just a benefit for the retailer, the advertisements served the customer by subsidizing the cost of production. Certainly, the advertisements in the diary’s pages were designed to sell something—if not furniture or bars of soap, then the perception that Wanamaker was a simple merchant whose advice could be trusted. But the presence of these advertising messages also insured that the diary would remain within reach of ordinary buyers. By selling space in his diary to companies whose products were available in his stores, Wanamaker offered the fi rms a captive audience and produced a diary far more deluxe than some of his customers would be able to afford. The advertising underwrote the diary’s apparent luxury. There were plenty of diaries and memoranda books for sale in Wanamaker’s book department, such as the five- by seven-inch “Memoranda book with lock and key, useful for diary or other private book” in “Persian seal” leather for $2.70, illustrated in Wanamaker’s 1901 Spring and Summer Catalogue No. 50. 58 At just 50 cents, the Wanamaker Diary could be had at a fraction of the price and offer the same kind of status that a memoranda book in Persian seal might bestow on a customer. When it came to the Wanamaker Diary, the retail giant was hardly

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the innovator he claimed to be. Although they may not have done it as respectably, patent medicine men such as Ayer or Hostetter deserve the credit for fi rst pairing advertising and diary keeping. The Wanamaker Diary represented a promotional formula consistent with the era’s advertising and consumption trends. For Wanamaker, it may not have been a matter of ingenuity, but of timing and fi nesse. The Wanamaker Diary came at the right time for Wanamaker and his customers. Wanamaker was more inclined to need such an advertising ambassador with his flagship store and his image in disarray at the same moment his audience may have been more receptive to such a product. Of course, Wanamaker did all he could to make this hardbound sales pitch attractive and desirable. He did that by making it respectable: an affordable, portable slice of refi nement. Wanamaker liked to brag that his stores were his pulpit, and that went for his diary too. In it he preached his own version of material progress. He wanted everyone, no matter how rich or poor, to participate in this world of abundance on display in the Wanamaker Diary. As a selfdescribed cultivator of taste, Wanamaker took its users window shopping and showed them all that was possible with a little money and style. He seemed to suggest that by budgeting wisely and using the cash accounts pages daily one might aspire to all that Wanamaker’s had to offer. It was a decidedly modern take on the old belief that diary keeping was a mode for self-improvement. Only this time the diary would produce savvy consumers as well as good Christians.

Epilogue

E

very biography needs an ending, usually closing when a subject dies, has left political office or public life. In the case of the daily planner, it is difficult to predict how its tale will end. Considering the intense competition nowadays from digital substitutes such as smartphones or online task managers, it seems miraculous that daily planners continue to be sold in great numbers across the globe. Despite declining sales, blank books remain a multimillion-dollar industry for international corporations such as MeadWestvaco, whose core products rely on customers still wedded to pen and paper. In fact, MeadWestvaco now owns and continues to market the Standard Diary brand, more than a century after Jane Fiske chose it as her daily diary. Maybe this is as it should be for a product that, although itself technologically unspectacular, rose to prominence during an era of great innovation in communication and timekeeping. After all, I argue that the daily planner oftentimes appeared immune to the changes in its midst such as the move toward mechanical timekeeping. Although it was a modernizing genre in the way it accustomed users to new ways of organizing their time and money, the format’s adaptability meant customers could fi nd uses and appropriations that allowed for a simultaneous continuity with the past. That may be the secret to the daily planner’s success and longevity. Another advantage over today’s digital planners is the low cost of entry. Although inflation has raised the price of the ordinary planner compared to the days when it could be purchased for 25 cents at the local bookshop, it remains a good deal compared to a smartphone or software program. One also needs no instruction or technical know-how to use

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the paper version. Apart from basic literacy, a customer requires very little preparation or training to begin using a daily planner. For these reasons among others, reports of the death of the daily planner, like the American newspaper, have been greatly exaggerated. A terrific case in point is Jane Fiske’s 1873 Standard Diary, a brand that—as mentioned above—has outlasted all its competition and continues to be sold today. In 1940, the Standard Diary Company published a circular celebrating its ninetieth anniversary. Company executives marveled at how far the fi rm had come since the days when its founders “rented two small rooms over a grocery store on Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.” Edwin Dresser and his partner Eben Denton “thought little that they were founding a business whose products would be sold and used from the Occident to the Orient, and that ninety years later would still be in full and vigorous operation.” Taking pride in an operation whose sole business was publishing a line of diaries and blank books, the executives celebrated the fact that “a very large part of our National history and progress, politically, industrially, and individually has been recorded in the past ninety years within the covers of Standard Diaries.” Fifteen years later in 1955, the company, according to a Cambridge city directory, was still doing business out of its purpose-built factory on Blackstone Street. It was not long after that, however, that the Wilson Jones Company, inventor of the three-ring binder, bought the fi rm, consolidating operations at its New Jersey headquarters but changing the product very little. So began a series of acquisitions that over the years saw the Standard Diary line trading up the corporate food chain (Keith Clark Inc. acquired it from Wilson Jones in 1984) until it landed where it remains today as one of the classic office products alongside Mead, AT-A-GLANCE, Cambridge, and Day Runner, all owned and distributed by MeadWestvaco. Although most of its $6.4 billion in annual sales comes from its packaging business, MeadWestvaco’s office products, sold in over one hundred nations worldwide, still account for a sizable chunk of its balance sheet. In 2010, those products accounted for nearly $750 million in sales, $141 million of that in profit. MeadWestvaco’s biggest competitor on the dated organizers front is ACCO Brands, which prides itself on its own corral of “powerful brands” such as Swingline, Day-Timer, and Wilson Jones that deliver more than a billion dollars in worldwide sales every year. Both companies are publicly traded on the New York Stock

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Exchange.1 Although some might consider it a relic, the daily planner remains big business. Even outside corporate boardrooms, the daily organizer and its ethic of time management remain omnipresent. Americans young and old are reminded at every turn that managing one’s time is a must of modern life and that such a task is best accomplished with the help of a daily assistant. The evidence appears everywhere. The taxi-top ad for a national airline that bragged “a fl ight for every space in your day planner.” The prevalence of stationery shops, especially along crowded airport concourses full of harried business travelers, urging customers in a marketing tagline to “embrace your inner organizer.” Time management workshops that promote the use of a day planner in a pitch echoing the language used by mid-nineteenth-century critics about the benefits of daily record keeping: “Make a habit of carrying it with you everywhere and don’t leave anything to memory.” An industry of self-help books with titles such as CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap aimed at coaching readers how to manage their fast-paced lives. 2 Reminiscent of Stephen Salisbury’s gift of Marsh’s Pocket Diary from his Uncle Waldo in 1848, American teens as young as eleven were asked recently in a sixth-grade English class to take out their dated planners to jot down that evening’s homework assignment. Even though these signs appear to demonstrate that the product was never more vital, the hardbound daily planner may be losing its footing. In a news release announcing its 2010 fourth quarter earnings, executives at MeadWestvaco put a brave face on declining sales figures: “In North America, shipments for dated and time management products, while lower than last year, were better than expected.”3 What is left unsaid in all of these corporate communications is the big hit the blank book industry has taken from the electronic and computer revolution of the late twentieth century. In some respects, that revolution has proceeded so swiftly that I could not keep pace with all of the changes. My epilogue became a moving target. When I began writing, the daily planner’s chief competition was the Palm Pilot and other personal digital assistants. Before long those electronic gadgets seemed dated, and I had to account for a flood of alternatives to pen and paper. Soon the Internet offered Americans a way to account for their days in a more public realm that allowed others not only to see but comment on their daily entries in blogs or on social network-

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ing sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Even our phones nowadays can handle what our pocket planners alone could do only a generation ago. Despite all of these technological advances, it seems worth asking whether these electronic alternatives have really changed anything. (The same question could be asked of today’s e-books that also retain the basic structure and elements of printed versions.) Many digital task managers mimic what you could do just as easily on paper: jot down “to-do” lists, record a phone number, check an important date on the calendar, calculate interest on a loan, or keep a daily log of activities. In fact, a friend recently observed the striking parallels between the early American almanac and the iPhone.4 Both prized for their portability, users could look to each to tell them what day it was, how to get from point A to point B, how much their money was worth, and what the weather had in store. Nevertheless, the almanac and its descendants had limitations. Although at least one colonist liked to “talk” back to his almanac, the connections these planners delivered were entirely virtual. Alvin Bartlett and Jane Fiske, writing in their remote rural communities in the 1870s, may have felt part of a wider world through the entries in their National Diaries, but they never knew the satisfaction of having someone comment on those daily notes in real time. Other ways in which the digital world beats the technology of pen and paper is its ability to provide a clean slate for those eager to start over. You may recall an attempt by diary manufacturers in the late nineteenth century to provide a planner with a “patented erasable surface,” but the experiment lasted no more than a few years. Today, there’s no need to purchase a new diary come January fi rst because digital assistants, and their web-based cousins, are designed to continue into the future indefinitely. Providing an almost limitless capacity for storage, there’s no need to fi nd space on your bookshelf to stack those used-up planners. No matter the challenges from its latest, and toughest, competitors, the daily planner may be endangered but it is far from dead. More than its adaptability, simplicity, and affordability, its enduring appeal as a stationery product speaks to the power of standardization. Like other nineteenth- century standards such as Noah Webster’s American Dictionary, Standard Time Zones, and the US System of Weights and Measures that, despite some tweaking over the years, still determine how we speak, tell time, and measure, the daily planner continues to wield its influence in how we account for our time and money. 5 It’s a cultural habit

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long ago fi xed in print and difficult to separate from the commercial product that spread it throughout a nation. Even today’s digital standins replicate what the daily planner standardized in the fi rst place, just as the e-book does for the hardback. There is no greater compliment or proof that the nineteenth-century entrepreneurs who invented the daily planner, journeyman printers who chose fortune over the fame of literary publishing, unleashed a potent formula.

Acknowledgments

T

he only pesky thing about writing a history of the daily planner is that everyone mistakes you for an avid diarist or record keeper. I am not, but wish I were since it might have aided this attempt to remember all the wonderful people who inspired and supported me over more than a decade of research, writing, and revisions as I nudged this project to completion. Working without a reliable memory aid, I think it best to proceed chronologically from inception to completion, tracing an intellectual and instrumental genealogy of scholars, librarians, archivists, and editors responsible for shaping and populating a rich and ambitious history. Although it has become a cliché, you may credit them with all that is good about this project and blame me for its faults. I must begin then at Brandeis University where I joined a small but smart cohort of PhD students in a small but amazing program in American history after spending almost a decade as a daily reporter. Although a tiny faculty by some comparisons, the classes were also small and with the generous funding of the Rose and Irving Crown Fellowships we felt equally supported and little competition from one another. Our colleagues at academic conferences always marveled at how close we were. I thank them for being patient readers and listeners. They are Eben Miller, Greg Renoff, Paul Ringel, Hilary Moss, Emily Straus, Benjamin Irvin, Jason Opal, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Bryn Upton, and Jeff Wiltse. I would never have made it to Brandeis without the pull and allure of its faculty, including James Kloppenberg, Jane Kamensky, Jacqueline Jones, and David Hackett Fischer, all celebrated in their fields and serious in their commitment to training and mentoring graduate students. Picking up a thread I began as a history major at Canisius College in

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Buffalo, New York, and inspired by the work of my undergraduate mentor Nancy Rosenbloom (who suggested I consider Brandeis in the fi rst place), I expected to study the Progressive Era when I arrived at Brandeis. Until I worked with Jane Kamensky. It was Kamensky who first saw the potential in the nineteenth-century diaries I’d initially viewed on microfi lm. When she saw the Xerox copy of Jane Fiske’s 1873 pocket diary, Kamensky said: “You have to write about that.” The best mentor is a model fi rst, demonstrating the kind of scholar you hope to be one day. Kamensky’s projects are ambitious, creative, and wide-ranging but, even as they reach for audiences beyond academia, they remain steeped in scholarship and informed by a depth and breadth of knowledge of many fields including history, art, architecture, literature, and economics. With Kamensky’s support and boundless encouragement, I charted a history that some said could not be done, and perhaps they were right. But I’d rather have tried than chosen something conventional and safe. I like to think she knew intuitively that that was not my style, nor my strength. A less ambitious project would have proven too boring to bother completing. Aside from being a tireless line editor, Kamensky has remained a dedicated advocate and understanding confidante long after it was her responsibility. More than advisor, she has proved a true friend. Finding the right place to do your research is almost as important as choosing the right adviser. It is not simply about locating the right stuff but identifying a place whose librarians and curators understand your project and are excited to help you overcome the challenges of finding the materials you need. For me, that place was the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Aside from housing an unparalleled collection of early American newspapers and periodicals, the AAS houses an incredible staff of talented and dedicated librarians, archivists, and curators who came to feel like partners in my project. When I began my research with the assistance of a Richard F. and Virginia P. Morgan Fellowship at AAS, online catalogs were fairly new, and for some places, still nonexistent. For that reason curators were crucial in helping to identify the daily planners in their collections. Tom Knoles, curator of manuscripts at AAS, did not hesitate before providing me with an annotated printout of all the diaries in their collections, indicating those that were likely to be the kinds of printed planners I was looking for. It saved me months of archival legwork and hours of calling up diaries that were blank journals or some other format that did

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not apply (something I did routinely at other archives). As a recipient of a Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellowship at AAS, I was fortunate enough to spend an entire year working with and getting to know the AAS staff. For that reason and for their continued interest and support, this project is as much theirs as mine. I want to thank especially John Hench, Caroline Sloat, Tom Knoles, Joanne Chaison, Marie Lamoureux, Georgia Barnhill, Laura Wasowicz, Jim Moran, Sue Wolfe, Elizabeth Watts Pope, and Ellen Dunlap. Without the support of fellowships from the Newberry Library and the Hagley and Winterthur libraries, I would not have been able to travel to Chicago and Wilmington, Delaware, respectively, to avail myself of those institutions’ rich manuscript collections. I would also like to thank the staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Litchfield Historical Society, the Beinecke Library, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia where Librarian James Green took an early interest in my project. I am continually struck by the generosity of the academic community. I can think of no other profession where people at the top of their game spend innumerable, unpaid hours training newcomers whose greatest hope is to replace them one day. Of course, with tenure-track positions shrinking everywhere but especially in the humanities, the likelihood of that happening for all but a fraction of those prospects is slim, and that makes the need for quality and strategic mentoring never more vital. The following list encompasses conference panelists, fellow Fellows at AAS and elsewhere, journal editors, and gentle readers of my book manuscript: David D. Hall, Davis Hackett Fischer, Ronald Zboray, Mary Saracino Zboray, Marilyn Ferris Motz, Linda Smith Rhoads, David Henkin, Caroline Cox, Laurel Ulrich, Konstantin Dierks, Thomas Augst, Kate Carter, Nan Ridehalgh, Rudolf Dekker, Arianne Baggerman, Susan Strasser, Catherine Corman, Richard Brown, Katherine Stubbs, Meredith McGill, Leon Jackson, Karen Kupperman, Mark Peterson, Martha McNamara, Karen Halttunen, Patricia Cline Cohen, Peter Stallybrass, Karin Wolf, Rebecca Steinitz, Jessica Helfand, Laura Furman, Matthew Rainbow Hale, Martha Elena Rojas, Joseph Cullon, Charlotte Haller, Thomas Wickman, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Jennifer Lynn Egloff. At Wellesley College, I want to single out those junior colleagues who sustained me through a few difficult years with conversation, drink, and

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sociability: Scott Gunther, Keri O’Meara (a.k.a. “the Mayor”), Nikhil Rao, Veronica Fuechtner, Don and Julie Elmore, Sealing Cheng, Stacie Goddard, Paul McDonald, Sally Theran, Alejandro Osorio, and Nupur Nag. After moving to the Bay Area in 2007, I am grateful to those faculty who took me under their wing and offered me an intellectual and logistical home that kept me connected and invigorated. At the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, David Kennedy and Richard White gave me a visiting scholar appointment at a critical time in my career and in my writing, as did Mark Peterson and the history department at the University of California–Berkeley the following year. The Bay Area Seminar for Early American History also served the role of staying connected to the great work of scholars in the field. Thanks especially to Caroline Cox, Dee Andrews, Alan Taylor, and Mark Peterson for their efforts in maintaining an important space for collaboration among academicians and lay scholars. In Chicago, Robert Devens was an early fan and a patient editor. I am so thankful he stuck by me as deadlines stretched and life got in the way of the fi nal manuscript. Always ready with answers to the smallest questions, Russell Damian helped me navigate permissions, formatting, and all the remaining details along the road to production. I also want to thank my new coworkers at the UC Davis Humanities Institute for supporting the project in its fi nal stages. It has proved a nurturing home for my intellectual growth and continued scholarship. Apart from all the professional and intellectual support I have received over the years, I am the lucky beneficiary of other forms of assistance, both actual and virtual, from a wonderful network of friends and family. Thanks to Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, Eben Miller, Hilary Moss, and Paul Ringel for reading reams of manuscript pages and for offering moral support along the way. Your own ambitions kept me going when I might easily have given up. Fellow fi rst-time moms Nana Howell, Beth Fenton, and Larisa Whipple cheered me on at playgroups and playgrounds as well as through text messages and e-mail. To my family who provided comfort and understanding at considerable distances: Kathie McCarthy, Bridget McCarthy, Michael McCarthy Jr., and Andria McCarthy. My mother-in-law Gloria Pankow deserves special mention for donating her own time so that I could complete my revisions without the interruptions of an energetic and curious toddler. That brings me to Lola, who demonstrated considerable patience all those times I snuck

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off “to work.” This book would not have been possible without Chip, whose support never wavered despite the challenges it presented for our family. Thanks for always being there. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to another historian: Michael McCarthy Sr. Throughout his professional life, most people knew him as a lawyer and politician. But as everyone in our family knew, he was just as passionate about history. In retirement as president of the Lower Lakes Marine Historical Society in Buffalo, New York, he helped create an incredible collection and museum devoted to Buffalo’s maritime history. Although it never occurred to me at the time, his stories about Buffalo, its inhabitants, and our ancestors instilled in me a devotion to digging up the past that sustains me and keeps me writing. I am so sorry he is not here to share in the publication of this book, a testament to his lifelong delight.

Notes Archive Abbreviations The archives housing the collections of documents cited in these notes are identified by the following abbreviations. AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA APS American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA BL Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT Duke David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC HL Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA LCP Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA LHS Litchfield Historical Society, Litchfield, CT MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA NL Newberry Library, Chicago, IL SL Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA WL Winterthur Library, Wilmington, DE

Introduction 1. Jane Briggs Smith Fiske, 1873 diary, Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, AAS. 2. On the history of some of these “standards,” see Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);

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Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); and Jon Bosak, The Old Measure: An Inquiry into the Origins of the U.S. Customary System of Weights and Measures (Pinax Publishing, 2010). 3. John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 5–6. For more on the history of consumption, see Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 2003). For the theoretical underpinnings of daily practice and “the cultures of the everyday,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 4. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, 8. 5. Ibid., 59–62. 6. For more on the communication and publishing revolutions of the early to mid-nineteenth century, see David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2007); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ronald J. Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 7. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 8. Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha

NOTES TO PAGES 8–11

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Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, Studies in the Life of Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (St. Paul, MN: Hungry Mind Press, 1995); and Harriet Blodgett, Capacious Hold-All: An Anthology of Englishwomen’s Diary Writings (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). 9. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 22 (1989): 56–65; Suzanne L. Bunkers, “Diaries: Public and Private Records of Women’s Lives,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 7 (1990): 17–26; Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia Anne Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Margo Culley, “‘I Look at Me’: Self as Subject in the Diaries of American Women,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 3 (1989): 15–22; Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 10. There are exceptions, of course, to the notion that scholars have failed to historicize diaries and diarists, though much of this work has examined diaries in the British context. See, for instance, Sherman, Telling Time; Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Chapter One 1. See, for instance, Washington’s notations in The Virginia Almanack for 1760 transcribed in Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, 6 vols., vol. 1 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976). The original manuscript pages of Washington’s diaries are digitized as part of the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html. Jefferson entered notes in interleaved pages of his Virginia Almanack for 1770 among others. According to editors of Jefferson’s papers, Jefferson used almanacs for his fi nancial records and

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memoranda related to his law practice throughout the 1770s (though the legal entries ended when he retired from the law in 1775). For further discussion of Jefferson’s record-keeping habits, see the Introduction and Descriptive Notes in James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Other early Americans who used almanacs as diaries included Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, and John Quincy Adams. 2. David S. Shields, “A History of Personal Diary Writing in New England, 1620–1745” (microform, University of Chicago, 1982), 45; and Richard Dunn, “John Winthrop Writes His Journal,” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1984): 189. 3. Lawrence Rosenwald, “Sewall’s Diary and the Margins of Puritan Literature,” American Literature 58, no. 3 (1986): 327–29. See also Matthew J. Shaw, “Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin: Almanacs and the Atlantic World,” Printing History, no. 2 (2007); and Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Although Rosenwald agreed that the almanac diary was more common in early America than the diary of spiritual examination, he claimed the genre was as “marginal” as the almanac itself. I take the opposite view and fi nd the almanac diary was a central habit in early American culture that illuminates how customers accounted for their time, their money, and their lives. 4. Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 1 (1982): 2; Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985), 4. 5. Zerubavel, Seven Day Circle, 4. 6. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 56. 7. Old Farmer’s Almanac for 2004 (Dublin, NH: Yankee Publishing, 2003). 8. Oftentimes, almanacs that survive will have a telltale nail hole or string still looped in its pages. See Shaw, “Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin,” 11. 9. Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: B. Franklin, 1977), 282. 10. Virginia Gazette, December 12, 1777. 11. B. S. Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 30. 12. Ibid. See also Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop: Governor of the Massachusetts-Bay Company at Their Emigration to New England, 1630 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1869), 437. 13. Joshua Hempstead, “Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Con-

NOTES TO PAGES 16–21

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necticut,” Collections of the New London Historical Society 1 (1901): 32; and Shields, “A History of Personal Diary Writing in New England,” 201. 14. Capp, English Almanacs, 61–62. 15. George Washington to George A. Washington, May 27, 1787, quoted in Jackson and Twohig, Diaries of George Washington, 1: xviii. See Washington’s 1771 almanac diary for his habit of labeling each page with the heading: “Where & how—my time is Spent.” Although Washington’s 1787 diary was not contained in an almanac, he maintained the same style he had perfected in earlier pairings. Washington’s diaries for 1760 and 1765–75 are contained in almanacs. Washington’s diary record picks up in 1781 when he substitutes blank journals for his trusted almanac, presumably to allow for more space for the expansive events surrounding America’s founding. 16. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, 6 vols., vol. 3 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 38–39. 17. Ibid., 39–41. 18. See Washington’s “Account Book 2, 1767–1775,” for copies of Washington’s correspondence with merchants in the American colonies and Britain housed in the collection of the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress. 19. Jackson and Twohig, The Diaries of George Washington, 3: 188. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 276. See also Robert F. Jones, George Washington: Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Leader (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 23–38. 22. Jackson and Twohig, Diaries of George Washington, 3: 336–38, 356. For a few key biographies of Washington, see Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1948–57); Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004); John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1989); and Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 23. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography; Ellis, His Excellency. Although Ellis routinely refers to Washington’s perfunctory diary keeping, he never mentions why that might be: Washington is following a cultural pattern set down by almanac diarists who preceded him. Neither Freeman nor Ellis specify what Washington was writing in. 24. Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Ulrich speculates that midwife Martha Ballard’s diary is styled after an almanac, though Ulrich does not explore the connection in great detail. 25. Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964); Edwin Wolf, The Book Culture of a Colonial American

260

NOTES TO PAGES 21–27

City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 26. Foundational studies of almanacs in both England and America do not devote much space to discussing the conversion of the annuals into diaries. See Capp, English Almanacs; Stowell, Early American Almanacs; and Timothy Feist, “The Stationer’s Voice: The English Almanac Trade in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 95, no. 4 (2005). For more on almanacs and their connection to time, see Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Sherman, Telling Time; and Shaw, “Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin.” Shaw seeks to make up for this deficit by exploring the connections among the “form, structure and distribution of almanacs . . . in the creation of national identity.” 27. Zerubavel, Seven Day Circle. 28. Quoted from the month of January in Samuel Stearns, The Universal Calendar, and the North American Almanack, For the Year of the Christian Era, 1792 (Boston: B. Edes and Son, 1791). 29. Thomas A. Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 17–24. 30. Sherman, Telling Time, 50. 31. Hannah Rodman Fisher diary, 1794, LCP. 32. Andrew Eliot diary, May 1740, Andrew Eliot Diaries, MHS. 33. Lynde Walter diary, January 1799, Lynde Walter Diaries, MHS. 34. Thomas Symmes, Notebook 1696–1774, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 35. Sherman, Telling Time, 56–58. 36. Jackson and Twohig, Diaries of George Washington, 3: 188. 37. Sherman, Telling Time, 62–65, 75. 38. Mark M. Smith, “Culture, Commerce, and Calendar Reform in Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998): 566, 58–60; and Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 39. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87. 40. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 23. According to O’Malley, by 1700 one white adult in fi fty owned a clock, and one in thirty-two a watch. 41. Aaron Wight diary, 1774, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. See also George Washington’s 1760 almanac diary in which the almanac writer offers “DIRECTIONS how to make a Striking Sun-Dial, by which not only a Man’s own Family, but all his Neighbors, for ten Miles round, may hear what o’clock it is, when

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the Sun shines without seeing the Dial.” Washington’s diary was contained in the Virginia Almanack, For . . . 1760 published by William Hunter in Williamsburg, Virginia. 42. Quoted in Milton Drake, Almanacs of the United States (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962), viii. 43. Hannah Rodman Fisher diary, February 1798, LCP. 44. Nathaniel Ames diary, March 1760, Dedham Historical Society. 45. Jeremy Belknap diary, March 1760, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 46. Shields, “A History of Personal Diary Writing in New England,” 199. 47. Jeremy Belknap diary, 1763, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 48. Sherman, Telling Time, 56. 49. Jeremiah Green diary, 1778, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 50. Sherman, Telling Time, 56. 51. Capp, English Almanacs, 285. 52. The Virginia Almanack for the Year of our Lord God 1771. 53. Alexis McCrossen, “Sunday: Marker of Time, Setting for Memory,” Time and Society 14, no. 1 (2005): 25–38. 54. Quoted in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, A History of the Book in America, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2000), 201. 55. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms; Zerubavel, Seven Day Circle. 56. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved: Being an Almanack and Ephemeris for 1758 (1757). 57. Capp, English Almanacs, 30, 62. 58. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 120, 36, 87. See also Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997): 13–39; and John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). 59. Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Bank Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008), 17. See also Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalism, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3, 15. 60. Jeremy Belknap diary, 1759, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 61. Nathaniel Ames, An Astronomical Diary for . . . 1761. 62. Caleb Gibbs diary, 1780, MHS. Thanks to Karen Northrup Barzilay for her help in acquiring a photocopy of the diary. 63. Beers’s Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1799, author’s collection. 64. Kamensky, Exchange Artist, 17.

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65. Jacob Bigelow diary, 1769, Jacob Bigelow Diaries, MHS; and David Brown diary, 1791, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 66. Thomas Balch diary, 1759, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 67. Jeremy Belknap diaries, 1759, Jeremy Belknap Diaries, MHS. 68. Jeremiah Green diary, October 1770, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 69. Jeremy Belknap diaries, January 1759 and 1768, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 70. William Barrell diary, 1766, William Barrell Diary, MHS; Andrew Eliot diary, 1740, Andrew Eliot Diaries, MHS; and Hannah Rodman Fisher diary, August 1794, LCP. 71. “Thoughts on the Improvement of Time,” The Christian’s, Scholar’s, and Farmer’s Magazine 2 (1791). 72. Priscilla Holyoke diary, 1766, Manuscript Collection, AAS. 73. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 186, 91. 74. Sherman, Telling Time, 49. 75. Jeremy Belknap diary, 1767, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 76. Jeremy Belknap diary, 1759, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. For a discussion of science as portrayed in almanacs, see especially Peter Eisenstadt, “Almanacs and the Disenchantment of Early America,” Pennsylvania History 65, no. 2 (1998): 143–69. 77. See William Pencak, “Politics and Ideology in Poor Richard’s Almanack,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 2 (1992): 183– 211. William Pencak, “Nathaniel Ames Sr., and the Political Culture of Provincial New England,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 22 (1994): 141–58. 78. Samuel Stearns also used the phrase “useful and entertaining” on his title page for The Universal Calendar and the North-American Almanack, For . . . 1792. The complete phrase read, “Containing Astronomical Calculations and a Variety of Things That Are Useful and Entertaining.” In a practice not uncommon in eighteenth-century publishing, Thomas probably lifted the phrase from Stearns or others and made it his own “original” motto. 79. Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature, 1607–1765 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 369. 80. Jeremy Belknap diary, 1761, Jeremy Belknap Papers, MHS. 81. Francis D. Donovan, The New Grant: A History of Medway (Medway, MA: Town of Medway, Massachusetts, 1976), 173. Francis D. Donovan, “Early Medway Settlers and Land Records,” (1996). 82. Aaron Wight diaries, 1769–1813, MHS. Although it appears as though Wight’s diary continues uninterrupted to 1826, a family member must have taken up the task after his death in February 1813.

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83. Aaron Wight diary, 1771, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. 84. Aaron Wight diary, January 1778, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. 85. For drawing of a bloody tooth, see Aaron Wight diary, December 14, 1772, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. Before the drawing, Wight recorded an eventful day in his young daughter’s life: “14 then Extracted a tooth for Poly fi rst.” 86. Aaron Wight diary, September 17, 1770, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. 87. Aaron Wight diaries, September 18, 1770; March 26, 1773; July 28, 1774; MHS. Other consumption entries, accompanied by drawings, include: “1771 July ye 16 then got my Turnd pumps” and “1771 Nov 28 cloudy & Rain then Got my wig.” 88. Aaron Wight diary, July 15, 1772, the fishing rod entry is undated at the bottom of his July 1772 diary page, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. Also that same year on October 12, 1772, Wight records buying tobacco, “12 Clear then Bought 5 pounds of tobacco.” This entry, of course, was accompanied by a drawing of a tobacco pouch. 89. Aaron Wight diaries, August 26, 1775, March 11, 1771, April 4, 1771 (note about Joseph Rider clock delivery contained on a memoranda page before the diary section), August 27, 1771, MHS. 90. Aaron Wight diary, October 3, 1775, MHS. Among the line-a-day entries on his October diary page, Wight wrote on the third, “Clear Mime Rutter Came to be Doctd.” It was at the top of this diary page that he broke out the third of October as a special day, for he wrote up top: “3 an Extrordnery Event hapined.” It’s only when the reader glances down to the line-a-day entries that the connection to Mime Rutter becomes apparent. Wight routinely used the top and bottom of his diary pages to break out significant events, such as births or deaths, or business transactions, such as the dates his horse was pastured in a neighbor’s field. 91. Aaron Wight diary, October 26, 1775, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. 92. Aaron Wight diary, January 17, 1776, Aaron Wight Diaries, MHS. Wight recorded his wedding day matter of factly in his line-a-day entries: “17 Snow & Rain & Hail then Married to Mime Rutter.” However, at the top of his diary page, Wight once again broke out the date as one to be remembered. He wrote “17 then Married Jemima Rutter.” Wight guaranteed that anyone looking back on his diaries would notice the entry, for he then underlined the entire thing with decorative scrollwork. At least one of Wight’s pen flourishes resembled the shape of a heart, and that was no accident. 93. Wight, The Wights, and Vital Records of Medway, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850 (Boston: New-England Historic Genealogical Society, 1905). 94. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel,

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NOTES TO PAGES 43–48

and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 95. Leonard S. Davidow, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac and Other Papers (Reading, PA: Spencer Press, 1936), 120; and John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?: A Historical Price Index for Use as a Defl ator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1992). McCusker calculates that on the eve of the American Revolution, 1 shilling Pennsylvania currency was worth around $2.30 and 1 pence about 19 cents, p. 314. Thus an almanac priced at 5d was roughly equivalent to one dollar in today’s currency. 96. Robert B. Hanson, The Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1758–1822 (Rockport, ME: Picton Press, 1998), 125–26. 97. The quotes from Ames’s diary come directly from his almanac diary for 1764, coincidentally interleaved in his father’s Astronomical Diary, or Almanack for 1764. Richard Draper’s letter is reprinted in a vignette on “The Ames Almanacks” in Hanson, Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 126–27. Richard Draper succeeded his father, Richard, in running his printing office. 98. Hanson, Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 125. For mentions of almanac negotiations in Ames’s diary, see entries dated September 8, September 20, November 8, November 12, 1766; October 8, October 19, November 13, memo 1767; July 14, October 29, memo 1768. 99. Poor Richard, 1733. 100. James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006), 118–19. 101. Ibid., 101. 102. Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography, Part 10. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. http://franklinpapers.org. 103. Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer, 123–24. 104. Benjamin Franklin to David Hall, March 28, 1760, franklinpapers.org. 105. Drake, Almanacs of the United States, 1010, 316. 106. See Boston News-Letter, December 4, 1766; and Boston Gazette, October 31, 1768. The almanac advertisements generally ran in the fall, announcing the publication of next year’s almanac. The generalizations in this paragraph are based on advertisements in several Boston newspapers, including the Boston Weekly News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, and the Boston Evening Post from 1750 to 1775 and the Virginia Gazette from 1736 to 1780. 107. See Boston News-Letter, October 29, 1767. 108. Poor Richard, 1733. 109. Ephemeris was yet another term used to refer to an almanac. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an ephemeris was “a table showing the pre-

NOTES TO PAGES 48–50

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dicted (rarely the observed) positions of a heavenly body for every day during a given period.” However, the ephemeris could also refer more generally to “a record of daily occurrences; a diary, journal.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com. 110. Hanson, Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 125. 111. Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer, 106. 112. Pennsylvania Gazette, December 6, 1739. 113. Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer, 137. 114. Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Karin A. Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 115. Introduction to the New Year’s Gift, 1741. 116. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 36. 117. Using Drake’s bibliography, I assembled a list of almanacs in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia that used the term “Ladies” in the title. In 1767, Benjamin West published The New-England Almanack or, Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary for 1767. This trend continued in Massachusetts throughout the 1770s, after which the title reverted simply to The New-England Almanack. 118. George Simpson Eddy, ed., Account Books Kept by Benjamin Franklin: Ledger “D” 1739–1747 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 47. I wish to thank Peter Stallybrass for this reference to “interleaving.” 119. Again, booksellers did interleave almanacs for customers, but it is difficult to gauge how much it may have cost. They probably paid extra for the service. Cyprian Blagden mentions the interleaving of London publisher Parker’s Emphemeris so that it could be used as a diary. The fact that the practice was routine among London bookbinders suggests the practice was also available in the American colonies. Cyprian Blagden, “Thomas Carnan and the Almanack Monopoly,” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 14 (1961): 26. 120. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Journals of Hugh Gaine, Printer (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), 32. 121. Samuel Johnson to Franklin, January 1752. 122. Benjamin Franklin to Abiah Franklin, October 16, 1747. 123. Benjamin Franklin to Susanna Wright, November 21, 1751. 124. Peter Collinson to Franklin, March 7, 1754, and Franklin to Richard Jackson, December 6, 1753. 125. Benjamin Franklin to David Hall, December 9, 1757, and Hall to Franklin, December 15, 1759.

266

NOTES TO PAGES 51–52

126. James Parker, “First Report on the Franklin and Hall Account,” June 14, 1765, http://franklinpapers.org. 127. James Parker to Benjamin Franklin, October 25, 1766, and Parker to Franklin, December 15, 1766. 128. Drake, Almanacs of the United States; and Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine, 9. 129. See Drake, Almanacs of the United States; Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Brian Maidment, “Re-Arranging the Year: The Almanac, the Day Book and the Year Book as Popular Literary Forms, 1789–1860,” in Rethinking Victorian Culture, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: B. Franklin, 1977); Robb H. Sagendorph, America and Her Almanacs: Wit, Wisdom, and Weather, 1639–1970 (Dublin, NH: Yankee Publishing, 1970); and Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 130. William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 219. 131. The phrase “useless and unintelligible learning” was used by the essayist “On almanacks” in Monthly Magazine 1 (1799): 86. For Thomas’s agenda, see George Lyman Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanack (Gansevoort, NY: Corner House Historical Publications, 1974). 132. Capp, English Almanacs, 276. 133. “Plan of an Almanac for the Use of People of Fashion,” Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence 3 (1798): 377–78. See also “Almanac Principles Analyzed and Explained,” Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany 2 (July 1788): 406; and “On almanacks,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1 (1799): 85–88. For a discussion of the decline of the occult in America, see Peter Eisenstadt, “Almanacs and the Disenchantment of Early America,” Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 143–69. 134. Columbian Centinel, November 17, 1824. 135. Some diarists began their diary record in interleaved almanacs and converted later to pocket diaries. See, for instance, the diary collection of Unitarian minister Andrew Bigelow in the manuscript collection at the American Antiquarian Society. 136. In the nineteenth century, Richardson and Lord announced “ALMANACKS The Miniature or Pocket Almanack, some interleaved with blank pages for memoranda” in an ad in the Columbian Centinel, January 19, 1822. See also ads in Columbian Centinel for November 1, 1823, January 7, 1826. 137. See NAIP records at AAS. This practice of borrowing almanac mat-

NOTES TO PAGES 52–57

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ter for printed pocket diaries was common among early diary producers. Others were William Young Birch, who borrowed almanac material from Johnson’s Pennsylvania and New Jersey Almanack for calendar pages in his annual American Ladies Pocket Book, and West and Richardson, who used almanac calculations from Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanack to insert in their yearly Massachusetts Registers.

Chapter Two 1. Aitken’s General American Register, and the Gentlemen and Tradesman’s Complete Annual Account Book, and Calendar, for the Pocket or Desk; for the Year of Our Lord, 1773 (Philadelphia: Printed by Joseph Crukshank, for R. Aitken, 1772). Although my analysis rests on more than a dozen of Aitken’s Registers in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Winterthur Library, a copy of Aitken’s Register is available in Evans’s Early American Imprints, No. 12299. The copy is of the Register used by George Nelson, the original of which is housed at AAS. 2. The Pennsylvania Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, December 12 to December 19, 1772, p. 196. Despite Aitken’s assurances of novelty, New York publisher Hugh Gaine came out—a year after Aitken ceased publishing his Register—with his own Universal Register, or American and British Kalendar, which he continued to publish annually for the next twenty years. However, Gaine’s Register did not contain a diary section like Aitken’s. That was unique to Aitken’s Register alone. For more on Gaine’s publications, see Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Journals of Hugh Gaine, Printer (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902); and Milton Drake, Almanacs of the United States (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962). 3. James Wilson diary, Aitken’s Register 1773, APS. There are two sets of entries in Wilson’s copy of the Register, one thought to be Wilson’s and the other believed to be an impostor who came into possession of Wilson’s diary some time after Wilson’s initial use. The subsequent entries, written in a cramped and almost illegible hand, refer to a series of sexual exploits performed purportedly by Wilson with a variety of women. Others who have studied the diary more thoroughly than I have suggested that the imposter hoped to discredit Wilson or, at least, sully his reputation in the wake of revolutionary events. Wilson diary, 41st week (October) accounts page; 40th week (October) account page, and November 10, 1773 memo page; January 5, 1773 and January 9, 1773; and scattered entries on memoranda pages from February through June 1773, APS. 4. Aitken explained his decision in the preface to the 1774 Register. 5. Drake, Almanacs of the United States, 911–1211. The discontinuation of

268

NOTES TO PAGES 57–60

Aitken’s Register is confi rmed by Milton Drake in his survey of early American almanac production. See also Robert Aitken, Waste Book, 1771–1802, LCP. 6. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, 53, 57. I particularly want to thank Jim Green of the Library Company of Philadelphia for pointing out the critical role Aitken’s bookbinding played in his publishing business and understanding how it drove such publications as Aitken’s Register. 7. Aitken’s General American Register, 1773. 8. The Reading Mercury, December 4, 1752. The date of Dodsley’s fi rst memoranda book is cited in Cyprian Blagden, “Thomas Carnan and the Almanack Monopoly,” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 14 (1961): 26. Blagden apparently never saw the original Dodsley book in question. Thus it is difficult to know when the format was fi rst published. Blagden wrote: “This was almost certainly not the fi rst of its kind but it is the fi rst of which I know the title and the name of the bookseller behind it and of which I have seen an early example.” Blagden examined a Dodsley memoranda book for 1762 in the collection of the British Museum. 9. Blagden, “Thomas Carnan and the Almanack Monopoly,” 26. 10. Rollo G. Silver, The American Printer, 1787–1825 (Charlottesville: Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1967); Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: Dominion Books, 1964); and Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, A History of the Book in America, vol. 1 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 11. Willman Spawn and Carol Spawn, “The Aitken Shop: Identification of an Eighteenth-Century Bindery and Its Tools,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 57 (1963): 422–37; and Vincent Freimarck, “Aitken, Robert,” American National Biography Online (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), www.anb.org. 12. William H. Gaines Jr., “The Continental Congress Considers Publication of a Bible, 1777,” Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 3 (1950): 274–81. 13. Spawn and Spawn, “The Aitken Shop,” 432. 14. For descriptions of Philadelphia during this period, see Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 15. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 313. 16. Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 106–7.

NOTES TO PAGES 61–65

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17. Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 155, 272, 276. 18. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv. 19. T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1998): 78. See also T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 249–60. 20. Sarah Fatherly, Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies: Women and Elite Formation in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 62, 59. Hugh Gaine broadside, 1771, AAS. Although Gaine’s bookshop was located in New York City, his stock mirrored that of the high-end shops in Philadelphia. 21. Nash, The Urban Crucible, 321. 22. Pennsylvania Gazette, May 18, 1769, 1. Quoted in Spawn and Spawn, “The Aitken Shop,” 431. 23. Breen, “Baubles of Britain,” 84–85. See also Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 24. Unidentified diary, Aitken’s Register 1774, HSP. Likely candidates among that group of diarists included Francis Hopkinson, John Witherspoon, and James Wilson, eventual signers of the Declaration of Independence, and John Penn and Joseph Galloway, delegates to the Continental Congress as well as Aitken customers. 25. Unidentified diary, Aitken’s Register 1774, Michael Zinman Collection, LCP. 26. “Jn Ross” diary, Aitken’s Register 1774, HSP. 27. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP. 28. Richard Peters, Aitken’s Register 1773, author’s collection. 29. Aitken’s Register 1773, “Explanation” page opposite “Contents.” 30. For the history of American almanacs, see Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: the Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: B. Franklin, 1977); Robb H. Sagendorph, America and Her Almanacs: Wit, Wisdom, and Weather, 1639–1970 (Dublin, NH: Yankee Publishing, 1970); and John Stanley Wenrick, “For Education and Entertainment: Almanacs in the Early Republic, 1783–1815” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1974). 31. In her study of Maine midwife Martha Ballard’s diary, Laurel Ulrich attributed Ballard’s diary-keeping conventions to the traditions of daybook and interleaved almanac. For more on the format of Ballard’s diary, see Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785– 1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 8–9. Unlike Aitken’s customers, Ballard had no access to printed diaries on the frontier and constructed her diary out of folded sheets of paper. 32. The Reading Mercury, December 4, 1752.

270

NOTES TO PAGES 66–71

33. See preface and contents page of Aitken’s General American Register, 1773. 34. Mein and Fleeming published a Massachusetts Register as early as 1767, according to Drake, Almanacs of the United States, 303. 35. Aitken’s General American Register, 1773, preface. 36. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP. 37. The Pennsylvania Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, December 12, to December 19, 1772, 196. 38. Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1976), 18. 39. In the same issue of the Pennsylvania Chronicle in which Aitken advertised his new Register, competitor James Humphreys announced the publication of his Universal Almanack . . . for 1773 with the almanac calculations performed by renowned Philadelphian and clockmaker David Rittenhouse. See Pennsylvania Chronicle, December 12, to December 19, 1772, 195. 40. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, 58–70. 41. Ibid., 59. 42. The “Green Turkey” Register was sold to “Mr. James at Mrs. Houses” for 8 shillings, Aitken Wastebook, LCP, 67. For wholesale sales mentioned, see Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, 64, 60, 63, 59, 68, 66, respectively. 43. Nash, First City; and Theodore Thayer, “Town into City, 1746–1765,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Nicholas B. Wainwright and Edwin Wolf, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). 44. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 13, 24–25; Martin Bruegel, “‘Time That Can Be Relied Upon’: The Evolution of Time Consciousness in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1790–1860,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 3 (1995): 548. 45. Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 689, 96, 709. See also Alexis McCrossen, “‘Conventions of Simultaneity’: Time Standards, Public Clocks, and Nationalism in American Cities and Towns, 1871– 1905,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 2 (2007): 217–53. 46. Thayer, “Town into City,” 98; Carolyn Wood Stretch, “Early Colonial Clockmakers in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 56, no. 3 (1932): 226; and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 9–10. 47. O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 25–27. 48. Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); E. P. Thompson, “Time, WorkDiscipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967); and Bruegel, “Time That Can Be Relied Upon,” 548.

NOTES TO PAGES 71–74

271

49. Unidentified diary, Aitken’s Register 1774, Michael Zinman Collection, LCP. 50. Nichols Goddard diary, July 24, 1795, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library. Goddard wrote in The Ladies New Royal Pocket Companion for the Year 1795. 51. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xi. 52. Nash, First City, 45, 63; and Billy G. Smith, “The Vicissitudes of Fortune: The Careers of Laboring Men in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 247–49. 53. See Oxford English Dictionary Online for an etymology of the word “pocketbook,” which could refer to “A book of memoranda, notes, etc., intended to be carried in a pocket; a notebook” or “A pocket-sized folding case for holding banknotes, papers, etc.; a wallet.” Sometimes it was difficult to ascertain the difference. For instance, an advertisement in an issue of the London Gazette in 1685 announced “Lost . . . a Pocket-Book, having an Old Almanack in it of the Date of Year 80 or 81.” To distinguish between the two uses, I use the term pocketbook to refer to a purse and pocket book for a diary or pocket-sized book such as Aitken’s Register. 54. Patricia Cline Cohen, “Reckoning with Commerce: Numeracy in Eighteenth- Century America,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John and Roy Porter Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1993), 328, 31. 55. For literacy rates in early America, see Ross W. Beales and E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Practices of Reading: Part 1: Literacy and Schoolbooks,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2000), 380. Thomas Watts quoted in Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 6, 6–12, 24–25, 29. 56. Nash, First City, 60. 57. John K. Alexander, “Wilson, James,” American National Biography Online (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), www.anb.org. 58. James Wilson diary, 1st week accounts page, APS. Barnett suggested the emphasis of the “here-and-now” in clock usage, but I think the characterization applies equally well to the to the enlistment of the diary for daily use. Jo Ellen Barnett, Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clock, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), 76. 59. Sherman, Telling Time, xi. 60. See appendix in Chris Bailey, Two Hundred Years of American Clocks and Watches (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975).

272

NOTES TO PAGES 74–79

61. Bailey, Two Hundred Years of American Clocks and Watches; and Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See Dohrn-van Rossum’s appendix for a list of clock production in America. 62. Barnett, Time’s Pendulum, 77. 63. See, for instance, the diaries of Elizabeth Shackleton, discussed at length in Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 64. Alexander, “Wilson, James,” American National Biography Online, www.anb.org. 65. James Wilson diary, 6th week (February) accounts page, 41st week (October) accounts page, 39th week (September) accounts page, 40th week (October) accounts page, February 11, 1773 memoranda page, APS. 66. For more on Nelson, see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution, 158–59. 67. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, 58–70. 68. George Nelson’s pocket diary is housed in the “Almanacs” collection of the American Antiquarian Society. It is cataloged as a Pennsylvania almanac under Aitken’s name and the title Aitken’s Register. One of the difficulties of surveying the production and consumption of these early printed diaries is in fi nding them. Archives have been inconsistent in their handling of the diaries, not knowing whether to catalog them as printed books or personal manuscripts. I discovered Nelson’s diary quite by accident, expecting to fi nd a blank, unused version of Aitken’s Register. However, I soon found that plenty of the “almanacs” housed at the AAS were indeed personal diaries. 69. George Nelson diary, HSP. 70. George Nelson diary, July 3, 1780, HSP. 71. “Richard Peters,” American National Biography Online, www.anb.org. 72. Richard Peters, Aitken’s Register 1773, author’s collection. 73. Ibid. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds the bulk of Richard Peters’s papers, including diaries for 1755, 1758, and 1762, but none dated later. Those diaries are hand-stitched sheets bound into small booklets with dated entries of fi nancial accounts. I want to thank Matthew Hale for examining Peters’s earlier diaries at the HSP. 74. These generalizations are based on the examination of the following Aitken’s Registers: at the Winterthur Library, unidentified, Rare Book Room; at the American Antiquarian Society, unidentified, Almanacs collection, and George Nelson diary cataloged under Aitken in Almanacs collection; at the American Philosophical Society, James Wilson diary; at the Library Company of Philadelphia, four uncataloged but contained in the Michael Zinman Collection, three unidentified and one inscribed by Joshua Howell, and three more

NOTES TO PAGES 79–83

273

in the Library Company’s book collection, one inscribed by John Dunkin, another by Ferdinand Coxe, and a third unidentified (all are cataloged under title and Aitken as author); at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, one unidentified and another three with inscriptions by “Jn Ross,” Ezekiel Edwards, and Thomas C. Mease. 75. John Dunkin diary, 15th week (April) accounts page, December memoranda page, 14th week (April) accounts page, December memoranda page, the Register is cataloged under title in books collection at Library Company of Philadelphia. 76. Dunkin and Coxe diaries, LCP. 77. Breen, “The Meanings of Things,” 250. 78. Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 12. See also Ellen HartiganO’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Hartigan-O’Connor charts a much more personal account of numeracy in her study of the economic networks women of all ranks forged in the revolutionary era in the cities of Newport, Rhode Island, and Charlestown, South Carolina. 79. Coxe diary, 22nd week (May) accounts page, back endleaf, LCP. 80. Dunkin diary, 37th week (September) accounts page, LCP. 81. See Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale; Rhys Isaac, “Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Refl ections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Mechal Sobel, Ronald Hoffman, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Louis Morton, “Robert Wormeley Carter of Sabine Hall: Notes on the Life of a Virginia Planter,” Journal of Southern History 12, no. 3 (1946). Ulrich notes in her introduction that Ballard’s diary most likely began as a record of her midwifery practice and mimics the format of an almanac. Both Isaac and Morton indicate that the Carters, father and son, often used an almanac for a given year’s diary volume. 82. Isaac, “Stories and Constructions of Identity.” 218–21. 83. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), x, 181–85, 213. 84. John Mason, Self-Knowledge: A Treatise, Shewing the Nature and Benefi t of That Important Science, and the Way to Attain It (Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), 121. For more on the practice of commonplacing, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki’s introduction in Catherine Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, eds., Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of

274

NOTES TO PAGES 83–90

William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and Susan Miller, Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). 85. Goddard diary, February 2, 1795, February 4, 1795, February 5, 1795, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Library. 86. Goddard diary, April 17, 1795, brass recipe as recorded on memo page before diary section, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Library. The defi nition of pinion is taken from Bailey, Two Hundred Years of American Clocks and Watches, 19. 87. Goddard diary, January 11, 1795, February 16, 1795, October 29, 1795, June 6, 1795, April 28, 1795, May 27, 1795, May 4, 1795, Downs Collection, Winterthur Library. 88. Howell diary, July memoranda page, 51st week (December) accounts page, Michael Zinman Collection, LCP. 89. Thomas C. Mease diary, 19th week (May) accounts page, May memoranda page, July memoranda page, HSP. 90. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 91. See, for instance, Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). 92. Even Esther Edwards Burr’s may have been inspired by the publication of the letters of Elizabeth Singer Rowe, who addressed a “circle of imaginary and real friends” in Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living, to Which Are Added, Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and in Verse (London: T. Worral, 1733). See Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 22. 93. Blagden, “Thomas Carnan and the Almanack Monopoly,” 26. 94. See the description of these early Ladies Books in Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 175–77. See also Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 24–27. Blodgett identifies several British female diarists who kept both a pocket book and an expanded diary, using the memo book in some cases to fi ll in events in the longer journal. 95. Drake, Almanacs of the United States. William Young Birch of Philadelphia introduced The American Ladies Pocket Book in 1797. 96. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP. David Hall and Elizabeth Reilly in “Customers and the Market for Books” warned about how women’s consumption of books was often hidden in sales ledgers simply because men were purchasing

NOTES TO PAGES 90–94

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volumes for their wives, in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 388–89. 97. Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy, 5. 98. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 20, 133, 165. 99. Alice Bunting diary, contained in The American Ladies’ Pocket-Book; or, An Useful Register of Business and Amusement, and a Complete Repository of Fashion, Literature, the Drama, Painting, and Music, for the Year 1802. Embellished with thirteen beautiful engravings (Philadelphia: John Morgan, 1802), cataloged under title in books collection at LCP. 100. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 172, 42. 101. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books before 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); and C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a discussion of letter-writing practices and the prescription offered in eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals, see Konstantin Dierks, “LetterWriting, Gender, and Class in America, 1750–1800” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1999). 102. Cited in Mrs. Robert Montgomery’s diary, contained in The British Ladies . . . Memoranda Book, for the Year 1770, HSP (located at LCP). 103. Mrs. Robert Montgomery’s diary, May 9, 1770, August 11, 1770, February 1, 1770, December 17, 1770, HSP. 104. Mehetable Amory’s diaries, Amory Family Papers, Bound Vols. 168– 80, MHS. 105. Men, too, inserted recipes and such into their pocket diaries, though the subject matter was decidedly gendered. For instance, Goddard included a recipe for making brass in his Ladies Book; Coxe included a “Recipe for a Cow that has lost her cud” in his Register; and an unidentified diarist included in his 1774 Register “Derichons for Making a plow” (the latter diary contained in the Michael Zinman Collection at LCP). 106. Caroline J. Keith diary, The Ladies’ Own Memorandum-Book; or, Daily Pocket Journal, for . . . 1797. Designed as a Methodical Register of all Transactions of Business, as well as Amusement (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1796), MHS. Keith resided in Pittsford, Vermont. Keith also used her pocket book as a register of expenses, recording there purchases of a “pr Gloves,” “Love Ribbon,” and “Crape and Needles”—the gear of mourning. 107. This anonymous diary is cataloged by author, title in “Dated Books” collection, AAS. 108. Hill quoted in Wulf’s introduction in Blecki and Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, 13.

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NOTES TO PAGES 95–98

109. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 61. See also Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1991): 50–67. 110. Karlsen and Crumpacker, The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 24. 111. One of three surviving commonplace books of Milcah Martha Moore is a three- by five-inch blank pocket book, about the size of Aitken’s Register. It has a fold-over cover and string that could be tied around the volume to keep in scraps of paper or perhaps keep out prying eyes. Blecki notes that Moore kept in it “prayers and personal reflections” and speculates that it was meant for a more private audience. See Blecki’s introduction in Blecki and Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, 60. 112. Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, entered on p. 219 and probably dated February 1774. 113. Nash, The Urban Crucible, 320. 114. Publishing remained a struggle up through the revolutionary period despite increased demand for books. See Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 156. Aitken advertised two new publications in his 1774 Register: The fi rst was the publication of Caspipina’s Letters and the second The Pennsylvania Magazine. The resolution to hire Aitken was entered on September 26, 1776, in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, available on the “American Memory” website at the Library of Congress, www.loc.org/ ammem/. See also Gaines, “The Continental Congress Considers Publication of a Bible, 1777.” 115. Gaines, “The Continental Congress Considers Publication of a Bible, 1777,” 297–98. Indeed, the authors assert that the obstacles to American publishing at the close of the American Revolution appeared overwhelming, and that no single edition of the full Bible (after Aitken’s) was printed in America for the remainder of the 1780s and “hardly any other books of substance were published.” 116. Aitken broadside, 1779, LCP. 117. See Aitken, Waste Book, LCP, for evidence of Aitken’s paltry distribution system. He sold many of his books wholesale to storekeepers or booksellers in the surrounding region, but New York was about as far north as Aitken’s printed wares reached. 118. For more on the rise of mass literacy, see William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 19 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000).

NOTES TO PAGES 100–105

277

119. Quoted in Spawn and Spawn, “The Aitken Shop,” 433. See also Gaines, “The Continental Congress Considers Publication of a Bible, 1777.” In 1801, Aitken advertised the sale of a print shop and all his equipment in the Philadelphia Aurora. See Silver, The American Printer, 1787–1825, 29. 120. Drake, Almanacs of the United States. See The American Ladies Pocket Book, for the Year 1800 belonging to Elizabeth Richards Child in the RichardsChild Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Before 1800, Childs used pocket diaries imported from London. 121. John Quincy Adams diary 25 (almanac), 1800, inside front cover (electronic edition). The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005), http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries.

Chapter Three 1. Susan E. P. Brown Forbes, Diary, 1841, Susan E. P. Brown Forbes Diaries, Box 1, Vol. 2, Mss. Boxes F, AAS. I refer to Forbes throughout this chapter by her maiden name of Susan Brown. 2. See also Mary Blewett, ed., Caught between Two Worlds: The Diary of a Lowell Mill Girl (Lowell, MA: Lowell Museum, 1984). 3. Columbian Centinel, February 15, 1804, January 19, 1805, January 2, 1811, February 17, 1821, February 13, 1805, January 22, 1800. Columbian Centinel, December 28 1822. 4. Columbian Centinel, November 22, 1826. 5. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades, 1789–1850: A Statistical and Geographical Analysis,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, ed. Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, distributed by Northeastern University Press, 1997); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). 6. See, for instance, the diaries of Amos Armsby, 1853, of Millbury, Massachusetts; Jotham Powers Bigelow (1855) of Springfield, Massachusetts (inscription on inside cover says he bought it of “nathaniel cate” for 38 cents); Ferdinand Crossman of South Sutton, Massachusetts (1855); and Susan E. P. B. Forbes of Boston, Massachusetts (1856), all at AAS. 7. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 219; and T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 19. 8. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846

278

NOTES TO PAGES 105–11

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003); and Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 9. John G. Bell, Diaries of an Expedition with John James Audubon, 1843, Western Americana Collection, BL. See, for instance, the following diaries in which the diarist transcribed the content of original, smaller diaries: Daniel Hale Haskell, 1855 journal, and Joseph Sumner, 1856 journals, both in the Ayer Collection, NL; Harrison Vandegrift Diary, Downs Collection, WL; and William B. Atwell, Civil War Diary of a Member of the 27th Ohio Infantry Regiment, Western Americana Collection, BL. 10. Susan Brown Forbes, August 18, 1843 diary, AAS. See also David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 11. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1843, AAS. For more on the rule-bound world of early factory towns, see Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830– 1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 12. Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades, 1789–1850: A Statistical and Geographical Analysis,” 235. See Zboray’s table 11 for a more detailed breakdown of taxable wealth of book trades people. 13. Peter Forney diary, 1858, Downs Collection, WL. 14. Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades.” 15. See, for instance, J. McAdam’s in the AAS trade card collection, and John Marsh broadside in AAS broadside collection. 16. Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades,” 215; S. N. Dickinson, Trade Cards, AAS; and Francis and Loutrel, Broadside, AAS. 17. The lists of diaries and their common characteristics were compiled from the author’s diary database derived from the holdings in the manuscript archives of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hagley Library, the Winterthur Library, and the author’s own collection. 18. Zboray, A Fictive People; and Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades,” 234. 19. The following advertisements announce the availability of The Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer and The American Ladies’ Pocket Book in Boston bookstores, fresh from Philadelphia: January 6, 1798, December 18, 1805, January 1, 1812, December 14, 1816. The American Ladies’ Pocket Book has been classified by literary scholars as one of the flood of literary annuals that rose in popularity in the antebellum period. See Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the

NOTES TO PAGES 111–13

279

Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Cindy Dickinson, “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825–1860,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 31 (1996): 53–66. 20. The publication fate of The Gentlemen’s Pocket Remembrancer was pieced together with the help of the NAIP records at the American Antiquarian Society. 21. Columbian Centinel, December 11, 1816. An ad the following year does mention Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanac but it appears as an afterthought, a footnote at the bottom of the ad: “Also, for sale as above—the Farmer’s Almanac for 1818—by R. B. Thomas.” Note average price of almanacs here or later; earlier ad notes the price of almanac costs 87 1/2 cents per dozen and 12 1/2 cents single (Columbian Centinel, November 13, 1805); same price cited in later ad, Columbian Centinel, November 4, 1820. 22. Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 70. 23. Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades,” 236. 24. Columbian Centinel, December 24, 1817, January 22, 1817, December 12, 1821. 25. Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades,” 215–18. The Zborays contend that the Boston book trades in the early nineteenth century were at the forefront of economic change “in their use of capital goods (steam presses, type, and especially, electrotype and stereotype plates) and their production of consumer goods for a mass market,” 215. 26. John Marsh, for instance, started out in hardware. Benjamin Loring tried out publishing before fi nding diary and blank book production more lucrative. Rooting around for a successful niche in the book industry was common in the country as well as the city. For a look at the country case, see Jack Larkin, “The Merriams of Brookfield: Printing in the Economy and Culture of Rural Massachusetts in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 96 (1987): 39–73. 27. Columbian Centinel, January 3, 1838. For reference to “blank books” or “account books” see, for instance, Columbian Centinel, December 17, 1825, December 23, 1815, December 25, 1817. 28. Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964), 181–82, 218–26. 29. The 1824 volume of the Massachusetts Register is contained in the almanacs collection at the American Antiquarian Society and was owned by an unknown diarist who did not use the volume daily but added manuscript notations in the diary pages and in the margins of the register. Other individuals who used the Massachusetts Register as diary or reference include Samuel Burnside, a jus-

280

NOTES TO PAGES 113–15

tice of the peace in Worcester, Massachusetts, who used the volumes annually from 1810 to 1822; William Jennison, a New England minister who bought the volumes each year from 1813 to 1842; Calvin Willards, who signed the title page of his 1831 register; and William Lincolns. Lincolns’s and Willards’s registers are contained in the almanacs collection at the AAS; Jennison’s and Burnside’s both in the AAS’s manuscript collection. The end of publication and succession of another title is noted in the bibliographic record, Loring’s Massachusetts Register for 1847. See also Milton Drake, Almanacs of the United States (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962). 30. Marsh’s early career moves are gleaned from listings in the annual Boston Directory, published by John H. A. Frost and Charles Stimpson. There is no listing for a John Marsh in Boston until 1822 when his name appears as “Marsh, John & Co. . . . hardware,” and in 1823 again “Marsh, John & Co. . . . hardware, 92 Newbury.” Meanwhile, Bela Marsh fi rst appears in the 1820 directory under the listing “Marsh, Bela, bookbinder & stationer 88 Newbury.” After 1823, John Marsh’s hardware business disappeared and was replaced in the 1826 directory with the following listing: “Marsh, John, stationer, 96 & 98 State. See advertisement,” and above it “Marsh, (Bela) & Capen (Nahum), stationers, 362 Wash.” 31. Marsh broadside, 1826, AAS. The Boston Annual Advertiser, annexed to the Boston Directory (Boston: Frost and Stimpson, 1826). Columbian Centinel, January 9, 1828. Marsh’s advertisement initially ran in the Columbian Centinel issue of November 21, 1827. 32. Charles P. Forbes, The Merchant’s Memorandum and Price Book: Adapted to the Principal Branches of Mercantile Business (Boston: John Marsh, 1827). A subtitle indicates that the volume is “particularly designed as a pocket memorandum for the country trader.” The AAS copy is inscribed “Jason Murdock, Wareham, Ms.” on front the endleaf. 33. David D. Hall, “Introduction: Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600– 1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William Leonard Joyce (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 10. 34. For the publication run of Anti-Masonic Almanac, see NAIP records at AAS. For reference to Marsh’s “Anti-Masonic Bookstore” (with an address identical to his blank book operation), see the title page of Anti-Masonic Tract, No. 5 (Boston: John Marsh, 1829). 35. Columbian Centinel, November 17, 1824, and January 1, 1825. By this time, West and Richardson had been renamed, after several partnership changes, to Richardson and Lord. 36. Astronomical Diary for 1845 (Boston: Thomas Groom, 1844), Almanacs, AAS. 37. See the back-page advertisement for Brown’s Almanack, Pocket Memorandum, and Account Book for 1850.

NOTES TO PAGES 116–19

281

38. See title page of Brown’s Almanack . . . for 1848 in the diary collection of Susan E. P. B. Forbes, AAS. Brown’s distribution scheme was gleaned from examining various copies in the almanacs collection of the AAS in addition to the volumes held in manuscripts collections such as Forbes. Forbes’s fi rst Brown Almanacks possess a Concord, New Hampshire, imprint but later copies (after Forbes moved to Boston) have an imprint for a McKim and Cutter of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Likewise, an edition of Brown’s Almanack . . . for 1840 in the AAS almanacs collection comes in three different versions in green, yellow, and pink paper wrappers. The green is Brown’s own New Hampshire imprint, yellow a Maine bookseller, and pink Asa Low of Bradford, Vermont. 39. Bibliographer Milton Drake may have appreciated the novelty of Marsh’s product since he did not include Marsh’s diary title in his catalog of American almanacs. Brown’s Pocket Remembrancers were included perhaps because they contained the word almanac in the title. See Drake, Almanacs of the United States. I’m not suggesting here that Marsh invented this new streamlined diary format. There were other versions that preceded his, if only by a few years, and may have inspired his own design. These diaries included Stewart’s Diary published by Samuel M. Stewart and later by Hymen Lipman, a Philadelphia stationer and blank book manufacturer, and Clayton’s Diary, published by E. B. Clayton’s Sons of New York. 40. The description of Marsh’s fi rst diary comes from the collection of Andrew Bigelow, AAS. A fellow book manufacturer in New York, Kiggins and Kellogg, emphasized its new diary layout in a trade advertisement: “One peculiar feature possessed by our Diaries, which will, we think, be a strong recommendation to the user, is their having twelve pages devoted to ‘Cash Account,’ (one page to each month) one page for ‘Annual Summary of Cash Account,’ and twelve pages (one for each month) for ‘Bills Payable and Receivable,’ thus combining with a Diary, a Cash and Bill Book,” Broadsides, AAS. 41. Zboray and Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades,” 249, 52. 42. Boston Annual Advertiser or Business Directory, annexed to the Boston Directory . . . 1850. The ad that mentions that Marsh’s diaries come in “four different sizes” was published as a quarter-page ad in Marsh’s Pocket Diary . . . for 1858. 43. Zboray, A Fictive People, 6–7, 9–10. 44. See ads in Columbian Centinel, December 11, 1816; January 10, 1818; January 5, 1820; December 16, 1820; December 28, 1822; December 27, 1823; January 1, 1825; December 30, 1826; January 9, 1828; January 2, 1830. 45. Jotham Powers Bigelow papers, AAS; and Peter Forney diaries, Downs collection, WL. Bigelow inscribed how much he paid for his diary and where he bought it on the front endleaf; Forney’s diary had a stationer’s tag pasted inside the front cover. 46. Susan Brown Forbes, 1849 diary, AAS.

282

NOTES TO PAGES 119–23

47. Aitken’s clientele were primarily gentlemen. There are few sales recorded to women in Aitken’s Waste Book, with the primary exception of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, the Philadelphia poetess. 48. See, for instance, the trade cards for Joshua Thomas of Boston, and R. Wilson DeSilver of Philadelphia, in trade card collection of Downs Collection, WL. 49. See Susan Brown Forbes, 1846 diary, AAS. 50. The Cushing and Sons billhead is contained in the Printed Bills collection in Downs Collection, WL. Other storefront illustrations that display women either directly outside or inside the store include Geo. R. Davis, Portland, Maine, 1855, in Printed Bills, WL; A. S. Barnes and Co. of New York, 1851, in Printed Bills, WL; Crocker and Brewster of Boston, 1833, Printed Bills, WL; Maurice Bywater of Philadelphia, ad in Philly Business directory; Bowles and Dearborn of Boston, 1827, Trade Cards, AAS; Ebenezer Larkin of Boston, AAS; S. N. Dickinson of Boston in the Boston Almanac for 1842; Thomas Groom of Boston, 1855, AAS broadside. 51. Small Profi ts and Quick Sales (Philadelphia: William H. Maurice, 1847), 22, 18. 52. Ibid., 7, 8, 11, 21, 8. 53. N. S. Beekley, Diary, 1849, AAS; Andrew Bigelow, 1847 Diary, Andrew Bigelow Papers, 1806–1889, AAS; and James M. Scofield, 1855 Diary, James M. Scofield Papers, 1823–1923, AAS. 54. John Bachelder, Diary, 1859, AAS; and Madilia Scofield, 1856 Diary, James M. Scofield Papers, 1823–1923, AAS. 55. Sarah Watson Dana’s diaries are housed at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Samuel Cobb’s at the Bostonian Society, Boston, Massachusetts; Andrew Bigelow’s and Sarah Edes’s at the American Antiquarian Society. Cobb was a commission merchant, banker, and mayor of Boston and Roxbury, Massachusetts, from 1874–76. 56. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, and others, 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82). Russell Tubbs’s diary and description illustrated at www.prices4antiques.com; Lorenza Berbineau diaries, 1851–69, in Francis Cabot Lowell (1803–1874) papers, MHS; and Israel Lombard, Papers, 1717–1862, AAS. 57. Susan Brown Forbes, 1843 diary, AAS. 58. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 3. 59. Kiggins and Kellogg, Broadsides, AAS. 60. Quoted in Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 72.

NOTES TO PAGES 124–28

283

61. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 464, 82–84, 88. 62. Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788– 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); Sellers, The Market Revolution; Richard L. Bushman, The Refi nement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1992); Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Balleisen, Navigating Failure. 63. Columbian Centinel, January 3, 1838. 64. Abraham Firth, Diary, 1852, AAS; and Mehetable Amory, 1811 Diary, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, MHS. 65. Mandana Street Ferry Greenwood, Diary, 1857–60, AAS. A stamp pasted inside the blank journal reads: “Thomas Groom & Co. Stationers, Account Book Manufacturers & Importers of English & French Stationery, 82 State Street, Boston.” 66. Franklin’s Way to Wealth; or, “Poor Richard Improved,” Industry Leads to Wealth (New York, 1817), 8–9. For the many afterlifes of The Way to Wealth, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006). 67. William Jones Hoppin, Account book, 1813–17, 1821, B. & T. C. Hoppin, AAS; and Amos A. Lawrence Diaries and Account books, Box 3, Folder 1, MHS. 68. C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books before 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); and Karen Halttunen, Confi dence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 69. William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life (1830; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 87. 70. Stephen Salisbury III, Diary, 1848, Box 65, Vol. 15, Salisbury Family Papers, AAS.

284

NOTES TO PAGES 128–36

71. Stephen Salisbury III, Diary, 1852, Salisbury Family Papers, Box 65, Vol. 17, AAS. 72. Stephen Salisbury III, Diary, 1848, and Diary, 1863, Salisbury Family Papers, Box 65, Vol. 15, and Box 66a, Vol. 7, AAS. 73. William Andrus Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide (Boston: Samuel Colman, 1835), 130–31, 223–27. 74. American Ladies’ Magazine (March 1834): 119. 75. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 22. See also Susan Miller, Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). 76. Mary Ware Allen, School Journal, 1837 December 19–1838 April 2, AllenJohnson Family Papers, Octavo Vol. 23, AAS; and Mary Service Steen, Journal, 1847–53, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, WL. 77. Emeline Moore, Diary, 1826–28, Downs Collection, WL; Frances Merritt Quick, Diaries, 1854–58, 1864, SL; Harry N. West, Diary, 1871–73, AAS; Kenneth Allen, Diary, 1874, AAS; Mary Ware Allen, School Journal, 1837–38, AAS; and Mandana Street Ferry Greenwood, Diary, 1857–60, AAS. 78. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1857, AAS. 79. Augst, A Clerk’s Tale; and Thomas Augst, “The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America: The New York Mercantile Library,” American Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1998): 267–305. 80. N. S. Beekley, Diary, 1849, AAS. 81. James Henry Cunningham, Journal, 1849, AAS; and Augst, A Clerk’s Tale, 24–25. 82. James Barnard Blake, Diary, 1851, AAS; and Amos Armsby, Diary, 1853, AAS. 83. Weaver quoted in Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 229. 84. Philip Lindsly, Improvement of Time: Two Discourses, Delivered in the Chapel of the College of New Jersey; December, 1822 (Trenton, NJ: George Sherman, 1823), 51–52. 85. John M. Wing, Diary, 1858, NL; and Amos Armsby, Diary, 1853, AAS. 86. Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845), 184–87. See also Thomas Allen, “Clockwork Nation: Modern Time, Moral Perfectionism and American Identity in Catharine Beecher and Henry Thoreau,” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 1 (2005); and Thomas Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 87. Sarah Watson Dana, Diary, 1851, Dana Family Papers, SL. 88. Victorine du Pont Bauduy, Papers, 1798–1861, HL.

NOTES TO PAGES 137–48

285

89. Victorine du Pont Bauduy, Diary, 1843, Papers, 1798–1861, HL. 90. Sarah Louisa Edes, Diaries, 1852–53, AAS; and Rosina Rhoda Houghton Moore, Diary, 1857, AAS. 91. Catharine E. Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), 7–8. 92. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1843, AAS. 93. Anonymous, Diary, 1856, LCP; Anonymous, Diary, 1859, Downs Collection, WL; and Frances Burgess, Diaries, 1864–65, Downs Collections, WL. 94. Anonymous, Diary, 1856, BL; and Z. Allen, The Traveler’s Register and River and Road Guide (1847), Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana, NL. 95. Martin Bruegel, “‘Time That Can Be Relied Upon’: The Evolution of Time Consciousness in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1790–1860,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 3 (1995): 550–51. See also Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 685–709. 96. Ferdinand Crossman, Diary, 1855, Crossman family papers, AAS; Peter D. Vroom, The Citizen’s and Farmer’s Almanac for . . . 1822, in Almanacs N.J., AAS; Bruegel, “Time That Can Be Relied Upon,” 548; and Paul B. Hensley, “Time, Work, and Social Context in New England,” New England Quarterly 65, no. 4 (December 1992): 533. 97. Graham Taylor, Diary, 1871, Graham Taylor Papers, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 10, Modern Manuscripts, NL. 98. Lauraman Russell, Diary, 1862, AAS. 99. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1845, AAS. 100. See, for instance, the Excelsior Diaries. 101. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 21. 102. Sarah Watson Dana, Diary, 1875, Dana Family Papers, SL. 103. Sarah Watson Dana, Diary, 1851, Dana Family Papers, SL; Jane Briggs Smith Fiske, Diary, 1871, Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, AAS; Ann J. Stoddard, Diary, 1866, SL; and Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1843, AAS. 104. Adelaide Crossman, Diary, 1855, Crossman Family Papers, AAS; James Barnard Blake, Diary, 1851, AAS; John M. Wing, Diary, 1858, NL; Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1843, AAS. 105. Jane Briggs Smith Fiske, Diary, 1873, Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, AAS. 106. Anna Quincy Thaxter Cushing, Journal, 1844, Anna Quincy Thaxter Cushing Papers, AAS. 107. Frances Merritt Quick, Diary, 1855, Frances Merritt Quick Papers, SL. 108. Mrs. Grace Middlebrook, One Year in My Life: Eleanor Winthrop’s Diary for 1869 (Boston: Published by D. Lothrop, 1870), 1, 9.

286

NOTES TO PAGES 148–60

109. J. Hervey Miller, Diary, 1907, Miller Family Papers, AAS; and Gabrielle Josephine Crofton, Diary, 1917, HL. The pocket diaries were titled Ward’s Trade Mark A Line A Day Book. 110. Susan Brown Forbes, Diaries, 1843, 1849, 1851, 1857, 1907, 1908, 1871, AAS. 111. Andrew Bigelow, Papers, 1806–89, AAS.

Chapter Four 1. Joseph J. Schroeder Jr., Montgomery Ward & Co. 1894–95 Catalogue & Buyers Guide No. 56 (Northfield, IL: DBI Books, 1977), 31. 2. The phrase “e pluribus Unum” appears on the title page of an 1880 Excelsior Diary in the collection of George Watson Cole, Papers, 1851–1939, AAS. 3. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). 4. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1879, 1885, and 1889, author’s collection. 5. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 6. I’ve pieced together this rough chronology with the help of Cambridge Directories from 1850 to 1882 and a company history published on the Standard Diary Company’s ninetieth anniversary in 1940. 7. America’s Unknown City: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Trust Company, 1936), 12–13. 8. Dallas Irvine, ed., Military Operations of the Civil War: A Guide-Index to the Offi cial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Civil War Centennial Commission, 1966), 83–87. See also Cheryl Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 9. Wells, Civil War Time, 87. Many of the almanacs published in the South during the Confederacy were found to contain “grossly inaccurate” sunrise and sunset data, which made timekeeping particularly confusing. 10. Jefferson Moses, Diary, 1863, www.ioweb.com/civilwar. 11. Charles Abbey, Civil War Papers, 1862–1901, AAS; and Ephraim C. Dawes, Pocket Diary, 1864, in Ephraim C. Dawes Papers, Series 4, Box 3, NL. 12. Henry White, Diaries, 1861–64, 1880, AAS; and William N. Green, Diary, 1860, 1864, Green Family of Worcester, Massachusetts, Additional Papers, AAS. 13. Ephraim C. Dawes, Pocket Diary, 1863, in Ephraim C. Dawes Papers, Series 4, Box 3, NL; and William N. Green, Diary, 1860, Green Family of Worcester, Massachusetts, Additional Papers, AAS. 14. Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 6–21.

NOTES TO PAGES 161–64

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15. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 185–89. 16. Arthur Gilman, ed., The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and NinetySix: A Picture of The City and Its Industries Fifty Years after Its Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1896), 340. 17. A Sketch Descriptive of the Printing-Offi ce and Book-Bindery of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co, with illustrations (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1877). Case, Lockwood, and Brainard manufactured the National Diary. 18. Gilman, The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six, 340. In addition, the 1869 Cambridge Directory confi rms the handover to Dresser and a partner, Caleb Wood, listing them as owners of the diary manufactory on Magazine Street, p. 117. Dresser became sole owner in 1871 when he bought out Wood’s share. 19. The zodiac symbol was fi rst used in 1872 when the title page still read simply Pocket Diary. The name Standard Diary was not used until 1874, the year in which Dresser copyrighted both. By 1880, the word “trade-mark” appeared inside the zodiac wheel on the title page. These details are gleaned from the Standard Diaries in the following diary collections: Susan E. P. Brown Forbes, George Watson Cole, A. T. Thaxter Cushing, J. Hervey Miller, Earle Pliny, George Gardner, J. B. Gough, and G. H. Norcross, all at AAS. The “trademark” symbol appeared in an 1880 diary owned by George Watson Cole, AAS. The “trade-mark,” according to the title page, was registered in 1879. The corporate name was changed officially in 1906 to the Standard Diary Company, according to a four-page pamphlet printed in 1940 in honor of the company’s ninetieth anniversary. 20. The earlier title comes from the title page of an 1852 diary owned by Andrew Bigelow, whose diary collection is housed at the AAS. The earliest Excelsior Diary I have found is dated 1869 and was owned by Sallie Pim Savery, in Thomas H. Savery Papers, 1848–1910, HL. By the 1870s, Kiggins and Kellogg had become Kiggins and Tooker. 21. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., 1989, notes that the term “excelsior” was used as a “trade-mark” as early as 1851 in a Catalog for the Great Exhibition and referred to an American brand of soap. Other examples include the Excelsior Spring Mattress referred to in a June 24, 1876, issue of the Furniture Gazette and an 1888 brand name for New Excelsior Test Cards in Arithmetic. An April 21, 1874, issue of the American Stationer refers to an Excelsior eyelet fastener among a list of “Prices current.” 22. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., 1989. 23. American Stationer, July 8, 1874; American Stationer, July 1877; Purchaser, February 1886, Trade Catalogs Collection, HL.

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NOTES TO PAGES 164–67

24. Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed. See also Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 25. Laird, Advertising Progress, 62. Because another national trademark law did not come until 1905, diary manufacturers protected their brands through copyright statute. 26. The earliest National Diary I have found dates to 1880 and can be found in the collections of George Watson Cole, an attorney in Wolcottville, Connecticut, AAS; Thomas H. Savery, of Wilmington, Delaware, HL; and Alvin Bartlett, of East Canaan, Connecticut, author’s collection. The title page of Cole’s diary noted that the name National Diary was registered in 1879, which may refer to the trademark. 27. See, for instance, the diary record of Susan Brown Forbes who bought a Patent Self-Closing Diary in 1872 but moved on to become a regular user of the Standard Diary. Other purchasers of the Patent Self-Closing Diary included J. B. Gough, 1870 diary; and John S. Baldwin, 1870 diary, all at AAS. See also Graham Taylor, Diary, 1871, NL; and David Clapp, Diary, 1869, MHS. 28. The phrase appeared on every Standard Diary title page and was also a feature of the National Diary. The American Diary and the Excelsior Diary tended to print nothing but the diary title, an illustration, and the year on their title pages. 29. Grenville Howland Norcross, Diary, 1911, in Diaries, 1860–76, 1911– 37, AAS. 30. See, for instance, the 1864 diary of John M. Wing, Wing Collection, NL, for San Francisco and St. Louis tables. The Standard Diary did not include data farther west than Chicago. See, for instance, the 1874 diary of George Watson Cole, AAS. 31. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1881, author’s collection. 32. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1880, author’s collection. 33. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1881, 1885, 1890, author’s collection; and Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1891, AAS. 34. Laird, Advertising Progress, 62–66. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1885. 35. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1873, AAS. 36. American Stationer, April 21, 1874, 2; American Stationer, August 8, 1875, 3. Julia Newberry’s 1869–71 journal did have a heavy, brass lock affi xed to the hardbound cover, but it was larger than pocket-sized and blank rather than commercially manufactured. Julia Newberry, Diary, 1869–71, Case Manuscripts, NL. 37. Susan Forbes’s 1890 Standard Diary has an elastic-band closure fastened to a metal clip on the back of which is engraved “Patented June 29, 75,” AAS. The elastic-band closure may have been patented in 1875 but, like the tuck, it

NOTES TO PAGES 167–75

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existed earlier. A trade catalog of Bangs, Merwin, and Company listed diaries produced by James J. Purcell, a New York blank book manufacturer, in 1862, many of them with elastic-band closures, Trade Catalogs Collection, HL. See also Henry Cohen catalog of 1859 for a picture of the elastic-band closure, p. 76, Trade Catalogs Collection, AAS. 38. American Stationer, June 23, 1874, 10. 39. See, for instance, J. B. Gough’s, Diary, 1878, AAS, and the 1872 diaries of Thomas H. and Sallie Pim Savery, HL. Sallie Pim Savery’s diary is inscribed “S. P. Savery from her husband Christmas 1871.” A stationer’s tag pasted on the inside cover indicates that Savery purchased the volume at James and Webb Printers and Stationers, 224 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware. By the late nineteenth century, most of the diaries have slots that may have at one time contained pencils. For diaries that still have the pencil intact, see Jotham Powers Bigelow, Diary, 1867, AAS; and T. Stewart Brown, Diary, 1865, Brown Family Papers, Downs Collection, WL. The pencils are both about three inches long, very thin, and have engraved along their length: “A. W. Faber No. 3.” 40. Mary Grosvenor Salisbury, Diary, 1863, Salisbury Family Papers, AAS. 41. American Stationer, November 23, 1874, 29, 23. 42. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1871, AAS; Thomas H. Savery, Diaries, 1865, 1874, 1876, and 1883, Thomas H. Savery Papers, HL; and Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1879, author’s collection. Bartlett listed the cost of the diary, “25” cents, in the “Bills Payable” section at the back of the diary. 43. Susan Brown Forbes, Diary, 1867, AAS. The inscription reads: “This diary was bought by A. B. Forbes but not used by him. Consequently I have taken it for the year 1867.” The diary was originally manufactured for 1866. 44. Jane Briggs Smith Fiske, Diary, 1890, in Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, 1806–1923, AAS. 45. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1889, author’s collection. 46. Schroeder, Montgomery Ward & Co. 1894–95 Catalogue & Buyers Guide No. 56, 31. 47. Walnut Valley Times, August 29, 1873, Eldorado, Butler County, Kansas. 48. American Stationer, August 8, 1875. 49. Youth’s Companion, October 31, 1878, 51, 44; and Youth’s Companion, December 19, 1901, 51. 50. Harper’s Bazaar, June 23, 1888, 21, 25; and Modern Retailing, vol. 8, n.d., 20. 51. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1879, author’s collection. 52. Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 15–16. 53. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1879, author’s collection. 54. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1886, 1889, author’s collection. 55. Charles Francis Adams II, Pocket Diaries, 1861–1915, in Charles Fran-

290

NOTES TO PAGES 175–78

cis Adams II Papers, MHS; Thomas H. Savery, Diaries, 1864–1910, in T. H. Savery Papers, HL; and Sallie Pim Savery, Diaries, 1860–1927, in T. H. Savery Papers, HL. 56. Freddie Bemis, Diaries, 1880, 1882; Isaac Bemis, Diaries, 1884–86, 1893; Kate Bemis, Diaries, 1880, 1881, 1883; and D. W. Cushing, Diary, 1880, all in Downs Collection, WL. See also Lizzie Wilson Goodenough, Diaries, 1865–75, and Lizzie Cora Goodenough, Diaries, 1901–3, in Lizzie Wilson Goodenough Papers, AAS. 57. Alvin Bartlett’s diaries for 1879, 1880, 1882, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1889, and 1890 are in the author’s collection. In the memoranda section of his 1882 diary, Alvin Bartlett wrote the dates of birth for himself and his brother, Hiram. Hiram was born March 4, 1867. On the history of the town of North Canaan, in which East Canaan is located, see John Rodemeyer Jr., Scrap Book of North Canaan, Illustrated (Canaan, CT: C. H. Pease, 1898). 58. Jane Briggs Smith Fiske’s thirty-four diaries are housed in the Manuscripts Collection at the AAS. 59. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1880, author’s collection. 60. See, for instance, Jane Briggs Smith Fiske, Diary, 1889, in Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, 1806–1923, AAS. 61. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1888, author’s collection. 62. References to Peter Henderson and his seed company appear on the following dates in Bartlett’s diaries: April 27, 1885, September 21, 1885, February 15, 1886, January 21, 1888, and January 18, 1889. Ditson’s company and the name of the songbook appeared in the “Memo” section of Bartlett’s 1890 diary. 63. On more than one occasion, Jane Fiske recorded women coming to her boardinghouse at night in search of clothes: “16 February 1871: . . . Two old women [this] evening called for clothes” or “17 February 1871 . . . Colored woman called this evening for clothes.” Jane Fiske, Diary, 1871, AAS. 64. Although this early work in the freedman’s schools is not recorded in her diaries, it is documented quite thoroughly in Fiske’s correspondence with her future husband, Friend Fuller Fiske, from 1865 to 1871. See Fiske correspondence in Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, AAS. Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 65. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1871, AAS. 66. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1871, AAS. For Lowell reminiscences, see Har riet H. Robinson, “Early Factory Labor in New England,” in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1883), 380–82, 387–88, 391–92, also available online at www.fordham.edu/ halsall/mod/modsbook.html; and Lucy Larcom, “Among Lowell Mill-Girls: A

NOTES TO PAGES 178–87

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Reminiscence,” Atlantic Monthly 48 (November 1881), or at www.boondocksnet .com/ labor/cl_811100_larcom.html. For a more general overview of the impact of Lowell on women’s work, see Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). My use of boldface type in these parenthetical diary asides indicates that the dates were printed by the diary manufacturer, not the user. 67. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1871, 1873, 1875, 1880, 1881, 1883, 1884, 1885, AAS. 68. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1876, 1880, 1883, 1887, AAS. For “Willie’s” additions, see Fiske’s diaries: 1875, 1877, 1880, 1881, 1883, 1885. 69. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1873, 1874, AAS. 70. Alvin Bartlett, Diary, 1889, author’s collection. 71. Fuller Fiske was likely a Quaker since Jane Briggs addressed Fiske as “Friend Fuller” in all of her correspondence with him before their marriage. 72. The “organ” Fuller brought home to his wife was a “melodeon,” which Jane Fiske mentioned in a diary entry dated September 13, 1873. 73. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1873, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1889, AAS. 74. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1875, AAS. 75. Karen Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 82–83. 76. Ella Pierce, Diary, 1877, LHS. 77. Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898), 313, 33. 78. Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 1 (1982); and Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 79. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Alexis McCrossen, “Time Balls: Marking Modern Times in Urban America, 1877–1922,” Material History Review 52 (Fall 2000): 4–15; and Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 80. Walter Ireland Dawkins, Diary, 1899, Downs Collection, WL; Charles Seabury Hale, Diaries, 1890–1934, AAS; and Sarah Watson Dana, Diaries, 1851–99, in Dana Family Papers, SL. 81. Michael O’Malley, “Time, Work, and Task Orientation: A Critique of American Historiography,” Time and Society 1, no. 3 (1992): 145–47. 82. Walter Dawkins, Diary, 1899, WL; Ella Pierce, Diary, 1877, LHS. 83. George C. Gardner, Diary, 1887, in Gardner Family Papers, AAS.

292

NOTES TO PAGES 188–95

84. Margaret Twist, Diary, 1908, in Wanamaker Papers, HSP; George Watson Cole, Diaries, 1872–82, AAS; and Jennie Gregory, Diary, 1895, Downs Collection, WL. 85. Marilyn Ferris Motz, “Folk Expression of Time and Place: NineteenthCentury Midwestern Rural Diaries,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 144–46. 86. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1871, AAS. 87. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1873, AAS. 88. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1879, 1889, 1890, author’s collection. 89. O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, 174. 90. Ella Pierce, Diary, 1877, LHS; and Thomas H. Savery, Diary, 1883, in T. H. Savery Papers, HL. 91. Gilman, The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six, 341. 92. Hiram Bartlett, Diary, 1885, and Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1879, 1880, 1881, author’s collection. 93. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1871, 1889, AAS. 94. Harper’s Bazaar, June 23, 1888, 25. 95. See chapter three for a fuller discussion on the topic of diary instruction. 96. Jane Fiske, Diaries, 1873, 1875, AAS. 97. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4; Margo Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1985), 7–8; and Laurel Holliday, Heart Songs: The Intimate Diaries of Young Girls (New York: Methuen, 1980), 117–18. 98. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1875, AAS. 99. Harvey J. Graff, Confl icting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 100. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1881, 1886, 1889, author’s collection. 101. Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1886, 1889, 1890, author’s collection. Near the end of his life, Bartlett, according to the 1930 US Census, lived alone, owned his own home, and earned wages as a farm laborer. 102. Lystra, Searching the Heart; and Margo Culley, American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 103. Gayle Davis, “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14 (1987); Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Judy Nolte Lensink, “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary of Female Autobiography,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14 (1987).

NOTES TO PAGES 195–207

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104. Sallie Pim Savery, Diaries, 1864, 1878, 1890, and Thomas H. Savery, Diaries, 1886, 1888, 1896, 1899 in Thomas H. Savery Papers, HL. 105. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1880, AAS; and Alvin Bartlett, Diaries, 1881, 1888, 1889, author’s collection. The recipes were not always for food, either, such as Bartlett’s recipe of “Mustard and Mollasses for pneumonia” scribbled in the “Memo” pages of his 1885 diary. “Johnny Cake” is a kind of corn bread usually fried on a griddle. 106. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 107. Jane Fiske, Diary, 1910, AAS. Some of the details of Fiske’s later life, such as her move to Hanson to live with her niece and her son’s employment as an entomologist, come from the collection notes of the Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, AAS.

Chapter Five 1. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 43–44, 110–11. 2. John Wanamaker, Diaries and Notebooks, 1857, 1860–61, 1894, 1897–99, 1911, 1914, 1919, in Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 3. Anonymous, The Wanamaker Diary 1913, author’s collection. 4. Wanamaker’s Ready Reference Diary for 1900, Wanamaker Papers, Box 81, HSP; The Wanamaker Diary 1913, author’s collection. 5. Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890– 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3–9. For more on the rise of consumer culture in this era and beyond, see T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 2003); and Leach, Land of Desire. 6. Mrs. E. E. Umholtz, The Wanamaker Diary 1926, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 7. Umholtz, The Wanamaker Diary 1926. 8. Leach, Land of Desire, xiii. See also Lears, Fables of Abundance. 9. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 148; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Scrapbook, Wish Book, Prayer Book: TradeCard Scrapbooks and the Missionary Work of Advertising,” in The Scrapbook

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NOTES TO PAGES 207–16

in American Life, ed. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2006), 98. 10. Leach, Land of Desire, 43–46. 11. Susan E. P. Brown Forbes Diaries, AAS; and Thomas H. Savery Diaries in T. H. Savery Papers, HL. 12. Garvey, “Scrapbook, Wish Book, Prayer Book,” 101. See also Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 13. Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, Introduction, in The Scrapbook in American Life, ed. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 8, 10. See also Jessica Helfand, Scrapbooks: An American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 14. Ott, Tucker, and Buckler, Introduction, 18; Helfand, Scrapbooks. 15. Margaret Moffat diaries, Boxes 83–89, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; 1905 Wanamaker Diary, Trade Catalogs Collection, HL; and George H. Taylor diary, Box 81, and Mrs. E. E. Umholtz diary, Box 85, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 16. These generalizations are based on approximately four dozen Wanamaker Diaries housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Hagley Library, the Winterthur Library, and in the author’s collection. 17. Margaret Twist, Diary, 1908, Box 82, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; 1913 Wanamaker Diary, unidentified owner, author’s collection; 1932 Wanamaker Diary, Rare Book Room, WL; Emma Umholtz diary, 1926, Box 85, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; Olga Zalokoski diary, 1931, Box 86, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; and 1923 Wanamaker Diary, unidentified, Box 85, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 18. Mary Elizabeth Taylor diary, Box 81, and Margaret Moffat diaries, Boxes 83–89, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; and William Styron, 1940 Wanamaker Diary, William Styron Papers, Duke. I’d like to thank Mrs. Rose Styron for permission to quote from the late William Styron’s Wanamaker Diary. 19. Margaret Moffat, Diaries, 1913–71, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. For a discussion of Moffat’s visits to Wanamaker’s, see also John Henry Hepp, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 154. 20. Margaret Moffat, Diaries, 1913–17, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; William Styron, Diary, 1940, William Styron Papers, Duke. 21. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 22. Mrs. Frace, 1932 Wanamaker Diary, Rare Book Room, Winterthur Library; F. J. Henry diaries, 1924 Wanamaker Diary, and 1932 Wanamaker Diary, unidentified Chatham, New York, widow, author’s collection. 23. Margaret Moffat diaries, September 7, 1918, June 27, 1914, January 2, 1934, Boxes 83–89, Wanamaker Papers, HSP.

NOTES TO PAGES 217–28

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24. 1932 Wanamaker Diary, unidentified Chatham widow, author’s collection; Margaret Twist diary, Box 82, Wanamaker Papers, HSP; William Fredrick Apgor, Wanamaker Diaries, www.merchantvillenj.com; and Mrs. Frace diary, 1932 Wanamaker Diary, Rare Book Room, WL. 25. Mrs. Frace, 1932 Wanamaker Diary, Rare Book Room, WL. 26. Margaret Moffat diaries, Boxes 83–89, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 27. Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 10. 28. Anniversary issue notes, Box 29, Folder 7, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 29. Lears, Fables of Abundance. 30. Herbert Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker: Philadelphia Merchant (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Publishing, 1999), 36–42, 73. 31. James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 105; and Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 99. 32. To be sure, some early diary manufacturers had inserted advertisements in their diaries long before Wanamaker. But they were restricted to advertising their own publishing house or bookstore, as in the case of John Marsh of Boston, or to announcing another of their publications, such as Aitken’s advertisement for the Pennsylvania Magazine that appeared on the last four pages of his 1774 Register. 33. Young, The Toadstool Millionaires, 125–43, 39; Stage, Female Complaints, 118. 34. This paragraph is based on fi fteen Pierce’s Memoranda Books in the author’s collection, including 1872, 1883, 1886, 1888, 1890, 1897, 1898, 1903, 1908, 1913, 1924, 1927, 1931. Pierce also produced a diary expressly for women titled The Ladies’ Note-Book and Calendar with Select Receipts and Household Information. 35. William Allen Zulker, John Wanamaker, King of Merchants (Wayne, PA: Eaglecrest Press, 1993). 36. Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 40–41. 37. John Wanamaker, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores (Philadelphia: John Wanamaker fi rm, 1911), 218. 38. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), xi; Leach, Land of Desire, 3; and Lears, Fables of Abundance. 39. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 96–97. 40. Lears, Fables of Abundance. 41. B. F. Berfield, “Is the Advertising Almanac Passé?” Printers’ Ink (May 1925); “Almanacs & Calendars,” Paper and Printing Trade (June 1880): 17; and the American Stationer 3, no. 61 (1875): 2–4. See also Susan Strasser, Satisfaction

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NOTES TO PAGES 228–45

Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 42. Joseph Appel, “Reminiscences in Retailing,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 12, no. 6 (1938): 81–82. 43. Young, The Toadstool Millionaires, 101; Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 150, 31–32, 19–20; Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor, 169; Joseph Appel, Growing Up with Advertising (New York: Business Bourse, 1940); Leach, Land of Desire, 51–54. 44. Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 86–96, 137. 45. Ibid., 86–96. 46. The Wanamaker Diaries 1913, 1915, 1923, 1924, 1929, author’s collection. 47. Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 42, 71; The Wanamaker System (Philadelphia: John Wanamaker, n.d.), Trade Catalogs Collection, HL; and The Wanamaker Diary 1900 and The Wanamaker Diary 1905, Wanamaker Collection, HSP. 48. Dictionary of Philadelphia and Its Vicinity (Philadelphia: John Wanamaker, 1887), Rare Books Collection, WL. 49. John Wanamaker diaries, 1860 diary, January 1, 1860, Boxes 15–16, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 50. Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 68. 51. The Wanamaker Diary 1926, Box 85, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 52. The Wanamaker Diaries 1923, 1924, 1926, 1929, 1932, author’s collection. 53. The Wanamaker Diary 1925, Box 85, Wanamaker Papers, HSP, and The Wanamaker Diary 1905, Trade Catalogs Collection, HL. 54. The Wanamaker Diary 1932, author’s collection. 55. Ershkowitz, John Wanamaker, 146. 56. The Wanamaker Diary 1913, author’s collection; and Meyer Weckstein letter, January 12, 1961, Box 29, Folder 7, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 57. Anniversary issue notes, Box 29, Folder 7, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. “Ready Reference Publishing Co.” fi rst appears on the title page of The Wanamaker Diary in 1941, though the company may have been the publisher earlier than that. See Margaret Moffat diaries, Boxes 83–89, Wanamaker Papers, HSP. 58. Catalogue No. 50 Spring and Summer, 1901 (Philadelphia: John Wanamaker), Box 71, Folder 2, Wanamaker Papers, HSP.

Epilogue 1. Standard Diary history pieced together from the following sources: The Standard Diary Company, “Our 90th Anniversary,” 1940, Cambridge Historical Commission; Manning’s Cambridge Directory, 1953–54; letters from Keith

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Clark, February 12, 1996, and American Brands Inc., March 8, 1996, to Philip D. Fessenden, a descendant of Edwin Dresser; and 2010 corporate earnings reports of MeadWestvaco and ACCO Brands available on their corporate websites. 2. Marketing pitch at www.timemanagementtraining.com. Edward M. Hallowell, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007). 3. MeadWestvaco news release, January 26, 2011, www.meadwestvaco.com. Of course, there are other reasons for declining sales figures, not least a recession that affected the bottom line of all retail businesses. But what I found most interesting about this release from MeadWestvaco was the way in which it singled out datebooks, reinforcing the fact that they continued to be an integral part of the stationery and office product market. 4. Thanks to Eben Miller for pointing out the striking parallels between an almanac and an iPhone after reading an early version of the opening chapter of this book. For a more extended look at the results of that conversation, see Molly McCarthy, “Redeeming the Almanac: Learning to Appreciate the iPhone of Early America,” Common-Place: A Common Place, an Uncommon Voice 11, no. 1 (2010). 5. Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); and Jon Bosak, The Old Measure: An Inquiry into the Origins of the U.S. Customary System of Weights and Measures (Pinax Publishing, 2010).