Collections : [University of Michigan William L. Clements Library]

Joshua Bragg (1865-1936) used this blank book, with an ornate cover title "Autographs", to collect signatures from people in Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Mansion House, White Lake, New York, and Dingman's Ferry. The Dingman's Ferry signatures include nicknames. Bragg's volume includes pencil and watercolor illustrations of wildflowers, an owl, a robin, and a view of Lake George from Bolton. Other illustrations are of a souvenir brochure (on a page with signatures from White Lake), a croquet mallet and wicket, a cottage marked "Goodenow's", an evergreen wood frame, and needles with flying insect surrounding P.A. Gifford's signature. Calling card motifs were utilized on multiple pages. Two pages of elaborate pen and ink drawings are caricatures and a domestic scene by Fred S. Roumage, dated 1882. The caricatures include a gangly soldier from the 7th New York Infantry Regiment and a coat of arms bearing geese, tennis rackets, and money, and an asses' head atop it. One is an antisemitic full length portrait of Jewish man holding a watch (possibly a watch seller), with a foreign accented 'quotation.' The domestic scene is in a bedroom, showing a mustachioed man trying to remove a kneeling woman's outer vestments in what appears to be a violent manner. The caption is "This scene above is not so tragic as one might suppose. It merely represented Mr. Smythe helping the lovely Mrs. Smythe to divest herself of her New Jersey." A small hexagonal tintype portrait of a young man is attached to the top of the page.

English politics; "our colored man" & Thanksgiving.