L.S. Alexander Gumby

Levi Sandy Alexander Gumby (February 1, 1885 – March 16, 1961) was an African-American archivist and historian. His collection of 300 scrapbooks documenting African-American history have been part of the collection of Columbia University since 1950 as the Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana. Gumby was also the proprietor of a popular bookstore during the Harlem Renaissance, where he was host of a salon. Gumby's passion for collecting earned him the nicknames "The Count" and "Mr. Scrapbook". In many cases, Gumby was the only person to keep these documents years after the events occurred. One example is a short series of letters on "Our National Capital", a speech given by Frederick Douglass. The letters were written between Grace Greenwood and Douglass himself.

quote=He was the Great God Gumby – God of his studio, God of all he surveyed, God could do no wrong. He allowed himself the luxury of temperament ... He was a true person and in reality he was the God he called himself — —Richard Bruce Nugent on Gumby at the time of his book studio. He was described as a "dandy" and a "Social Butterfly", his style being described by Nugent as "Fancy clothes, a perennial walking stick, pale yellow kid gloves, and a diamond stick-pin made him the Beau Brummell of his particular little group".

Collection In September 1901, aged 16, Gumby made his first scrapbook with clippings concerning the assassination of President McKinley. Gumby had organized his clippings by 1910, and took his archival work seriously, visiting similar collections in libraries across the United States and Canada. Gumby also became acquainted with fellow African-American archivist, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Working as a waiter at Columbia University Gumby began fraternizing with academia and students, adding clippings to his collection about popular professors and Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler. In 1925 Gumby's collection so crowded his 2½ rooms that he was forced to lease the entire second-floor unpartitioned apartment of the house in which he lived. Gumby initially found it easy to acquire his collection as "Negro" items were considered of little interest to book dealers.

The scrapbooks contain autographed photos, stories and letters from such notable performers as Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Ethel Waters, and letters and autographs from Black historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Father Divine, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey.

Gumby kept collecting while hospitalized, including articles about his hospitalization, get-well cards and photographs of friends who visited him. Upon his release from hospital Gumby retrieved and began restoring his collection, and continued to add to them. In 1950 Gumby donated his collection to Columbia University and in 1951, Columbia hired him for eight months to help organize the collections. Gumby continued to add to his scrapbooks until his death from complications from tuberculosis in 1961. The 300 scrapbooks are part of Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Butler Library as the Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana.

In the early 1920s he exhibited his collections in cities along the East Coast of America, and was subsequently included in the 1922 edition of the Private Book Collectors' Who's Who.

Gumby said of his collection that it "... could well be called 'The Unwritten History ... There are so many surprising and startling historical events pertaining to, or relating to the American Negro that are not recorded in the Standard Histories, dictionaries and school text-books, or if so, they are shaded so that they sound like a Ripley's 'Believe It or Not.'" A variety of different formats make up the scrapbooks including newspaper stories and magazine articles, and autographs, letters, photos, theatre programmes and documents concerning slavery. The scrapbooks have subsequently been converted to microfilm.