Don't Be Evil, Google--I Love You Too Well to Give You Up

Putting it mildly, the recent Google Book Settlement is certainly not all rainbows and butterflies for the publishing world--or for authors who want to retain control over their writing (read an excellent break-down of the settlement and its troubling repercussions here).  But, I confess the immediate payoff of having access--even in "snippet" form--to otherwise unsearchable data is remarkably useful to an individual researcher like myself.

"Don't Be Evil Google" image by Buddy Duncan, as posted on The Boston Phoenix "Phlog"

When I began graduate school, I enrolled in a required course that covered the basics of advanced library research, and of course I've picked up a trick or two along the way as a paid research assistant and scholar-in-training conducting my own thesis / dissertation driven research, so I know my way around print / online bibliographies and the like.  But there are, of course, always limitations to what gets recorded in the first place, or in figuring out the most useful search terms to find what is documented.  Like it or not, the Google Book Settlement has cleared a few more pathways as I recover the writing of Eleanor Youmans, and I can't help but feel excited about these new discoveries.

For months, I've been looking for her entry in Who's Who, unsuccessfully, though our university library has rows upon rows of shelves housing copies of several of its imprints.  And, just a month or two ago, I'd thoroughly exhausted all "Eleanor Youmans" searches (and its variants), including those within Google Books.  Now, seemingly overnight, there is a whole host of hits that never surfaced before.

Turns out, Youmans first appears in a 1937 volume of American Women: The Official Who's Who Among the Women of the Nation.  From this entry, I learned the titles of two other magazines in addition to Child Life in which she published short stories, one being Junior Home, and the other The Animals' Magazine (based in London, and which I'm fairly certain is the title of the English magazine that "copied" her early Cat Courier stories, inspiring her to pursue novel writing).  The Who's Who blurb also narrows her location during her year-long residence in California specifically to Santa Barbara.  Other "snippet" references lead to an article she wrote for The Writer in 1928, several more book reviews, quite a few mentions of her work in curriculum guides, and three more short stories anthologized in two Bobbs-Merrill readers.  

I'm taking an Electronic Texts course this semester, and about to begin a research assistantship with UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, so I'm looking forward to learning more about the moral and technical issues implicit in the Google Books Settlement--and in digital archiving in general.  Though I have a deep enthusiasm for Eleanor and her writing, enjoy creating a space where I can bring together the information I'm discovering about her, and hope to make her work more accessible to a larger audience, I'm often dubious about revealing too much on the web.  I don't want to infringe on any copyrights of book reviews or library holdings, or make public that which should be kept private.  Plus, if I've just spent hours, months, or even years talking with people in the know, applying for competitive library residencies, trekking cross-country to view elusive materials, scanning rare documents and images, do I really just want to give it up to the public realm so easily?  And yet, isn't sharing and disseminating knowledge--especially if it fosters greater enthusiasm and appreciation--the whole point?  Whatever the answer, in an ever-increasingly online world, the ease of posting otherwise hard-to-find material sometimes feels to me a bit slippery.

Researching an All-But-Forgotten Life

I've been planning to research and write about Youmans for years, but it was a random internet search for her name during a break in the fall semester last year that made me realize that I actually had the tools to do the research at my fingertips. Her name was indexed in The FictionMags Index created by a private user. Till then, I never knew she wrote anything but children's books. A door into an essentially forgotten life was opened.

Beginning with WorldCat, I compiled a complete list of her novels (and their reprints) and the volumes of Book Review Digest at the university library showed me where to find most of the book reviews listed on this site. What we didn't have in hard copy in the library I've requested via Interlibrary Loan over the past six months. A couple of the reviews were in works so obscure it took several months for the ILL office to track down copies (when most typically take a week). My mother gave me several of Youmans's books, inscribed to her, and I've managed to build a complete library of her novels from online used and antiquarian book sellers. The Pataskala Public Library once owned a collection of her works, but donated them to the Granville Historical Society.

Love Memorial Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Photo credit: David Keyzer

Neither the Ohio Historical Society, nor the Licking County Historical Society have any information pertaining to Youmans. The West Licking County Historical Society—which covers Pataskala—has published a small amount of information on her, of course, and has been a vital source as I gather material. I plan to visit with some of its members this summer to compile more information. Of especially tremendous insight has been one of Eleanor's friends, who has been kind enough to correspond with me over the last few months, sharing with me her time and valuable memories. The Ohioana Library has a small file on her work, and has been very helpful. The Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University may have some information as well, since they have the Will Rannells papers, and I will be visiting their repository this summer.

July 16, 1914 Cover of Life Magazine, featuring artwork by Will Rannells.

Because Youmans is one of my relatives (my first cousin, three times removed) I had some insight into her life through genealogical records. In fact, I was able to connect with her great-nephew (my third cousin, once removed) through a genealogical society. He has graciously shared with me some of Eleanor's letters, family histories she authored, a few photos, and even an unpublished short story she wrote for her sister's children.

By extension, a free trial on ancestry.com allowed me to search out newspaper articles on her in a local paper, the Newark Advocate. If only archives of the Pataskala Standard were accessible online! The Pataskala Public Library holds a collection of the newspaper on microfiche. Their machines only allow you to view the articles, however, and not print them. For a while, my mother was serving as my research assistant, scouring the old papers for information on Youmans as I'm now living out-of-state. Eventually, I plan to pay a visit to the Ohio Historical Society where they have a more complete microfiche collection of The Standard and viewers that enable printing.

Pataskala Public Library. Photo credit: Kids Linked

A 1937 Newark Advocate article explains that Youmans got her start when a friend asked her to write copy for Cat Courier, the monthly newsletter of the Cat Fanciers' Association. A magazine in England apparently copied the stories, and "the idea looked too good to discard." There seem to be only three places in the world that have copies of Cat Courier dated during the decades when Youmans would have written for them—New York Public Library, Maryland's National Agriculture Library, and the Jean Baker Rose Memorial Library at the CFA headquarters in New Jersey. Since I don't know specific issues of page numbers, and these newsletters don't include indexes or tables of contents, the only real way for me to find her stories will be to actually flip through the newsletters by hand. Some day! And I would love to figure out which English magazine copied the stories.

New York Public Library. Photo credit: PFHLai

The recent acquisition of digitized texts by Google and now available through Google News has sniffed out even more references to her titles. Periodic internet searches have lead me to online auctions of works containing her stories, including Child Life magazine and a "safety reader" that contextualizes Skitter Cat (a white Persian) and Major (an Airedale) in light of teaching children how to keep pets safe. On my next trip to Minneapolis I plan to peruse the main library's collection of Child Life to see if she published in any other issues.

August 1935 Cover of Child Life Magazine

The mother lode of Eleanor Youmans related library holdings is retained by the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. They house the manuscript collection of her Indianapolis based publisher—Bobbs-Merrill, containing approximately 700 pages of correspondence, biographical data, readers' reports, and promotional material pertaining to Youmans. Some day, some day!

Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington. Photo credit: Vmenkov