Below, is the first issue of an unrecorded Boston broadsheet series, Humorous Scraps. Whether there ever was an issue number 2, I do not know. It is undated, though the style of the cartoons (which are most likely of British origins), is typical of that found during the 1830s up thru the early 1850s. “Scraps” sheets of multiple cartoon images, were particularly popular in the 1820s and 1830s. And then, there is the three cent price of the sheet. In 1851, the U.S. issued a three-cent coin, so, perhaps, the price was to reflect an available coinage.

I had always assumed that the sheet was published by one of the Boston publishers of comic almanacs. So, prior to posting this, I went through my almanac collection, to compare the address given at its bottom — No. 46 Washington Street, Boston — against the addresses listed on comic almanacs from this period. None of those Boston publishers, however — Charles Ellms, James Fisher, S.N. Dickinson, Finn, Arthur Ainsworth - were listed at No. 46 Washington Street. A wider search finds that in the 1830s, The Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper by Garrison & Knapp, was published at No. 46 Washington Street. It was also in this period, a meeting place for the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. In the early 1840s, the address was occupied by Wilder & Company, who in 1843 published from this address, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad. In 1851, and continuing into the 1860s, the address was a meeting place of the Masonic Oddfellows, Sons of Temperance.

So, we present here a mystery, a lone (known) surviving example, date unknown, publisher unknown.

Click on picture to see an enlarged version.

Doug Wheeler