7. Grangerisation: Content-Sharing in the Days Before Facebook

A key feature of Facebook is the ability to share external content or other people’s posts on the platform by clicking the ‘share’ button. According to a recent poll by Buzz Sumo (2017), the most typically shared content on Facebook is music videos, followed closely by breaking news, viral quizzes, tribal political posts and recipes. Kim (2018) believes that these findings show that users have a particular fondness for material that is entertaining, heartwarming or inspiring. Equally, they tend to gravitate towards information with a strong tribal element that clearly emphasises a distinctive social or cultural identity. Oeldorf-Hirsch and Sundar (2015) have found that Facebook users typically share content to act as opinion leaders within their social networks, encourage discussion and potentially increase their involvement in current events.

In the 19th century, a new way to share information with others emerged. It was known as grangerisation. Grangerisation describes the process whereby books are customised by the incorporation of thematically linked visual materials. It took its name from James Granger whose Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution was published in 1769 without illustrations and quickly prompted a fashion for adding prints to the text. Early grangerised texts tended to be patriotic in tone and antiquarian or historical in subject, but by the late 19th century, the pastime grew in popularity and the book genres became more diverse.

While the primary aim of grangerisation was to add superfluous information on an author or topic to a book, just as today, it enabled people to be creative and share particular materials that promoted them as knowledgeable. Furthermore, as grangerisation was a relatively costly pursuit that involved tracking down particular images, its sharing could also grant owners cultural capital amongst their peers – much in the same way as those sharing content on Facebook hope to achieve today.

Initially, grangerisation was a practice associated with the upper-middle classes who had the necessary free time and money to dedicate to this hobby, but by the Edwardian era, the cost of print production had decreased dramatically, opening up grangerisation to the lower classes.

However, grangerisation was not a pursuit that appealed to everyone. Numerous newspaper articles of the period criticised the practice for destroying copies of books by tearing out images just to share them with others by adding them to another one:

“Thousands of fine books must have been butchered to make the collector's holiday, suggesting the epicure who had a sheep killed regularly for the sake of the sweetbread.”

“They [grangerisers] are Robbers of Peter to pay Paul.”

“The book ghoul who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking and mutilating the volume from which he steals.”

Another reoccurring criticism centred around people using grangerisation to appear more intelligent than they actually were. In other words, by ‘reposting’ images or content, they were accused of showing off and trying to frame themselves as experts on a particular topic. Grangerisers were described derogatively by the Acton Gazetteer as “look-out men” who search for any particular subjects on which they can share their views with others. This is something for which Facebook users who repost content have also been widely chided.

While grangerisation clearly bears some key differences to Facebook in its physical movement of content from one volume to another rather than posting something in a semi-public digital space, the commonality that caught my attention was their shareability factor. By the early 20th century, grangerisation was no longer a private practice; book owners carried it out with the purpose of sharing and displaying their handiwork to others, thereby seeking social validation, approval, acceptance and general liking (Bazarova and Choi, 2014, p. 638). As Tucker et al. (2006, p. 10) note, these ‘scrapbooking’ practices fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption and etiquette that helped the newly emerging lower-middle classes in particular to perform taste and knowledge.

Take this grangerised copy of Notes from the News, which was owned by the commercial traveller Henry Harvey Frost. Frost has filled his volume with extra illustrations and newspaper clippings of famous people, including Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. In including such highbrow figures, Frost is able to associate himself with this particular type of culture and knowledge, and knowing that the volume will be shared amongst his peers, will likely grant him cultural capital. We also see this approval seeking in a grangerised copy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Common Sense of Municipal Training, owned by Thomas Heptonstall, a commission agent from Liverpool. For both book owners, their grangerised books act as “interest tokens” that double as a “cultural vocabulary for the language of taste” (Liu, 2007, p. 257) and signal their cultural aspirations and desire for social distinction.

In a similar vein, the owner of Hesper and Hedone – the journalist Holbrook Jackson – has grangerised his copy with original photographs, bookplates, letters, poems and newspaper clippings concerning the author Frederick Richardson. However, in this case, being a literary journalist grants Jackson a position of legitimate authority that is more likely to be taken seriously by peers when the book is shared with them. The same can be said for the grangerised books of poet Edmund Gosse (see Marie Corelli’s The Silver Domino below). Again, his role as an opinion leader is more likely to be taken seriously rather than viewed as an act of social posturing because it is accompanied by first-hand evidence of his relationship with famous literary figures (e.g. correspondence, photographs together) rather than relying on tentative links or knowledge.

Looking at Edwardian examples of grangerisation, the tribalist element that Kim (2018) recognises in shared content on Facebook is also highly apparent. A case in point is this copy of Riches and Poverty by Leo Chiozza Money – an analysis of the distribution of wealth in the United Kingdom – owned by George Daggar. George Daggar was a coal miner from Abertillery, but obtained a scholarship in 1911 to study at Central Labour College (CLC). Daggar became heavily involved with trade unionism and the growing socialist movement and went on to be elected a Labour MP in 1929 and a lecturer in economics and industrial history. His copy of Riches and Poverty is packed with newspaper clippings on socialism, the distribution of wealth and railway nationalisation, many of which are dated and correspond to his time at CLC when he was developing his knowledge of the growing labour movement. From inscriptive evidence, we know that Daggar shared his grangerised books with his classmates at CLC and that they recognised him as an authority on the subject, thereby turning the books into collaborative acts of self-fashioning.

So, despite their differing forms and varied ways of sharing content with others, we see some fundamental similarities between grangerisation and Facebook reposts regarding legitimacy of knowledge and authenticity. Most Edwardian grangerisers were highly aware that their books would be shared with others and, therefore, filled them with content that would present them in a positive light and frame them as experts. However, just as today, this status was more likely to be granted if their knowledge was seen as authentic. Equally, just as today, knowledge-sharing tended to divide people into tribal groups centred around political views, literary taste and musical interests. As Day Good (2012) notes, these ‘scrapbooking’ practices show that sharing content on social media is entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies by which people bring together “personal media assemblages” to enact rituals of consumption, the hoarding of treasure and exchange of knowledge.

References:

Bazarova, N. and Choi, Y. 2014. Self‐Disclosure in Social Media: Extending the Functional Approach to Disclosure Motivations and Characteristics on Social Network Sites, Journal of Communication 64(4), pp. 635-57.

Buzz Sumo, 2017. 2017’s Most Shared Facebook Content: Viral Posts, Videos & Articles, 12 December, https://buzzsumo.com/blog/the-most-shared-facebook-content-posts-videos/

Day Good, K. 2012. From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives, New Media and Society 15(4), pp. 557-73.

Kim, L. 2018. What the Most Shared Content on Facebook Can Teach You About Engagement, 5 September, https://medium.com/the-mission/what-the-most-shared-content-on-facebook-can-teach-you-about-engagement-176ab1b07eeb

Liu, H. 2007. Social network profiles as taste performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), pp, 252-75.

Oeldorf-Hirsch, A. and Sundar, S. 2015. Posting, commenting, and tagging: Effects of sharing news stories on Facebook, Computers in Human Behavior 44, pp. 240-49.

Tucker, S., Ott, K. and Buckler, P. eds., 2006. The Scrapbook in American Life, Temple University Press.

Newspaper Articles (all from www.britishnewspaperarchive.com):

Grangerising, Bristol Times and Mirror, 4 February 1890.

Literature: The Magazines, Sporting Gazette, 1 January 1887.

To Grangerise, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 7 January 1904.