Une lecture rehaussée : le Telegraph in America de John Horn, 1879

As part of that experience, some readers alter, enhance, and add onto a book’s text and pages. This can be in the form of marginalia, where a reader marks the page with critiques, annotations, or even scribbles and doodles. Another practice is when a book’s owner inserts extra illustrations to supplement the text. The resulting composite volume is what book historians and collectors refer to as grangerized. The practice of grangerizing has elements of scrapbooking, but it is marked by enhancing an existing book. In some especially involved cases, book owners would dismantle a book, make inclusions that greatly expanded its size, and reconstruct it as a unique and personal volume. Both practices can help reveal what a reader thought about a particular book and how they used it as a resource.

Whether marks on a page, commentary on a text, or material additions, enhanced reading experiences are extraordinary. They augment the book and communicate ideas and information that the original and unmodified version cannot. Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation holds a fine example of a book enriched by its owner: The Telegraph in America: Its founders, promoters, and noted men.

John Horn filled his copy of The Telegraph in America with all sorts of additional materials including personal recollections, correspondence, envelopes, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and photographs. He even included the program for Morse’s 1871 commemoration and an invitation to the private reception that followed. In some cases, the supplementary material is glued into the book and in others, the additions are loose and tucked between the pages. Annotations in the book are also thrilling. Horn corrects typographical errors and adds information and details informed by his own experience with the world of telegraphy. As an object, the book is more than just a copy of The Telegraph in America. The inscribed and material additions offer insight into how this reader used the book as a resource. John Horn was a dedicated collector of all sorts of materials associated with telegraphy. Ingenium also holds a sizeable scrapbook made by Horn. It is filled with letters, portraits, and ephemera related to Samuel Morse and the telegraph’s early history in the United States and Canada.

John Horn did not make the insertions at random. He supplemented the text in very specific ways. While it is not clear if someone has shuffled around the unattached papers, in their present state, most of them offer auxiliary information to enrich the reading experience of the pages between which they appear. Nearly all of the papers have a number written in pencil in one of the top corners, which indicates that Horn meant for his additions to have order. When the book mentions a particular person, and Horn provided extra information, he often underlined the associated name in a blue editor’s pencil. Fittingly, it is reminiscent of a hyperlink – the reader is meant to jump over to whatever inclusions the creative reader inserted to augment the reading experience. There are at least 144 items added to Horn’s volume of The Telegraph in America.

For example, a portrait of the scientist James Freeman Dana is included where the book explains his contributions to telegraphic technology. On the portrait’s reverse, Horn scrawled, “copied especially for me, at my expense.” In another case, when the book mentions Benjamin Franklin, Horn includes a letter from the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania that acknowledges a donation to their library. When the book notes a trip that Samuel Morse took from Havre to New York in 1832, John Horn includes an envelope from the captain of the ship on which Morse sailed. On the envelope’s reverse he wrote, “The writing of Cap’t W. W. Pell of the ‘Sully’.” A funeral card for the inventor Harrison Gray Dyar has a personal note glued into the front, signed and dated by Horn, detailing his own memory and encounters with him. One of the 45 engravings included in the book is of William Corcoran, a Washington banker and telegraph financier. To make his copy superior, Horn includes a paper with Corcoran’s original signature, dated with the personal message, “Mr. John Horn with the regards of W. W. Corcoran.” The supplementary materials are detailed and varied.

Among the more sizeable inclusions is a 10-page handwritten copy of a speech made by William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, when he revealed a bronze statue of Morse at the 1871 Central Park celebration. Horn also included a portrait of Bryant clipped from a magazine. As Horn’s volume has other copies of speeches made by dignitaries and telegrams received at the memorial, it is likely that this copy was written by Bryant and recited from in 1871. The address does not appear in the published version of The Telegraph in America.

The most striking inclusions are ones that directly insert John Horn into the world of telegraphy more fully than he is credited in the book’s published form. The material insertions place Horn alongside the people historicized in the book. For example, the section that describes Morse’s memorial in New York includes an image of Morse sitting at a table with a telegraph, surrounded by people, with three vases filled with flowers placed in the foreground. In pencil, John Horn added the names of the people pictured, including himself, and records that it was he who placed the three flower vases in front of the table. It is an inconsequential detail, but one that establishes his presence at an important moment, helping to shape the scene. While the book also includes a printed sample of Morse’s handwriting, Horn incorporates a second example – the envelope from a letter Morse wrote to him 1871. On the reverse he notes, “The writing of Prof. Samuel F. B. Morse Inventor of the Electric Telegraph”.

Some items appear out of place. For example, a portrait of a man named T. C. Elwood. It is numbered 63 and placed between the front endpapers. It was likely meant to appear on page 341 where he is listed as a Divisional Superintendent for the Dominion Telegraph Company in Toronto. A possible reason for this is who the book passed to after John Horn. On the front flyleaf there is an ownership signature for Elwood Bigelow Hosmer, dated 1893. Elwood Hosmer was the son of prominent Montreal resident Charles Hosmer, who started work as a telegraphist at Grand Trunk Railway Telegraph before becoming the General Manager of Canadian Pacific Telegraph in 1880. In the 1870s, however, Charles Hosmer worked with T. C. Elwood as a Divisional Superintendent for the Dominion Telegraph Company. Moreover, both names are marked by a pencil on page 341. It is possible (though impossible to verify) that the portrait was removed from its place as Elwood Hosmer shared the book and the photograph with his father. What is more, item number 62 is absent from the book. It is possible (but again speculation) that the missing item was a portrait of Charles Hosmer, removed from the book, and repurposed by his son. With John Horn and Charles Hosmer being both from Montreal and the book passing to Charles Hosmer’s son, at the very least the book’s provenance gestures towards a fraternity and network among telegraph operators.

The fact that Horn’s volume of The Telegraph in America passed to a new owner well before his death in 1926 suggests that he meant for these material additions to be used and referenced by other readers. Remarkably, there are a few unnumbered items that may have been inserted by Elwood Hosmer – letters addressed to his father. While the extra illustration and textual inclusions were started and overwhelmingly carried out by Horn, Hosmer must have continued to fill the pages with additional pieces he believed relevant to supplement the book’s text.

John Horn’s volume of The Telegraph in America is part history of the telegraph and part history of his life and personal interactions in the world of telegraphy. Though the book mentions his name only once in passing (that he contributed to organizing the 1871 event to celebrate Morse) Horn’s version of history situates himself in a network with prominent people in the telegraph industry and implies he played an essential part of the history of the telegraph in America.