PROTECTOGRAPH
By:
August 25, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
I had a variety of jobs growing up in uptown Kingston. One was taking out trashcans along Washington Avenue, particularly at a doctor’s office where my mom worked as a typist. It was in a cardboard box behind this office that I found the Protectograph. I did not know what it was. It registered in my mind as some sort of adding machine. (My grandparents had one of those, which had a similar lever like a one-armed bandit.)
The device was not rusting then as it is now. The big knob on the right felt substantial. It made a series of thunks rather than clicks when you turned it, very satisfying. When you popped it open, you found a rolling ink pad that to this day will sully your fingers if you mess with it.
There was an old desk in my room on Warren Street. I never studied there, it was more like an art installation. On its surface, you would find a random variety of objects from the 19th and early 20th century. The overall effect was some kind of control panel from a Jules Verne story, steampunk before steampunk. I’m not sure when the idiosyncratic collection began. It reinforced a personal mythology that I’d been reincarnated from another time period and just happened to be passing through the 1970s.
The Protectograph fit right in with the compasses, containers, 50-year calendars and other objects of mystery. It did not matter that I had no idea what it was manufactured for. Its purpose was to be present as a totem object whenever my gaze should happen upon it. “I am as strangely out-of-place in this century as you are.”
The objects atop my boyhood desk would eventually disperse, but some would follow me, including the Protectograph. It would migrate from desk to bookshelf, where it made an excellent curio, giving your eye something to toy with, a pleasant contrast with the books it was keeping company.
It’s not a family heirloom. In theory, it should not be that difficult to part with this object. I feel as if I knew someone else would appreciate it, then it would be OK to let it continue its life in someone else’s collection.
If the Internet had existed in the 1970s, maybe I would’ve looked it up immediately; it would not have remained an object of mystery. Contemplating parting with it now, I finally do a quick search online and discover that it is a check-protecting device manufactured in Rochester in perhaps the 1930s. Paradoxically, learning what the Protectograph actually is makes me want to keep it.
If you were in Adam’s place, what would you do with the Protectograph? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.