Signs and Wonders: Margaret Kilgallen's Inside Job

Hand painted signs by Margaret Kilgallen, circa 1996
Courtesy Book Arts & Special Collections
San Francisco Public Library

During the 1990s while she was working in the Library's Preservation Department, artist Margaret Kilgallen made hand painted signs for the Technical Services work areas. The original hand lettered signs greeted library workers for years, until Technical Services began the move to another building down the street from the Main Library. A plan was hatched to reproduce these fragile signs for the new work spaces, while preserving and placing the originals in the Book Arts & Special Collections Center.

Margaret's wonderfully folksy signs identify such operations as Bindery Prep, Book Repair, Catalog, Periodical Processing, Receiving, and more (ten panels in all). Painted on door skin using recycled paint, the signs were made with an eye for the beauty of the letterform and brought immediate cheer to the workplace. The Library staff love that Margaret made these signs just for them, and we're happy that we could preserve them for you!

Here's a recent interview with former SFPL conservator Dan Flanagan in which he talks about Margaret's art, her work at the library, and her unique point of view (from KQED's Gallery Crawl, July 2011).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kJWWdpLDvk


Margaret also created zines: Nellie Was There and Fly By Night may be found in the Little Maga/Zine Collection, Book Arts & Special Collections Center.

Read and view more about Margaret Kilgallen:

Art in the Streets organized by Jeffrey Deitch; with Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose (New York, NY:  Skira Rizzoli in association with MOCA, Los Angeles, 2011)
Art:21 Art in the Twenty-first Century. Executive producer and curator, Susan Sollins
([Alexandria, Va.]: PBS Home Video, c2004)
Beautiful Losers. A film by Aaron Rose; co-director Joshua Leonard
([United States] : Oscilloscope Pictures, c2009)
Glen Helfand, "The Mission School: San Francisco's street artists deliver their neighborhood to the art world," San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 26, 2002 [Accessed 26 August 2011]
Margaret Kilgallen : In the Sweet Bye & Bye. With texts by Alex Baker, Eungie Joo, and Susan Sollins (Los Angeles : REDCAT, c2005)

Geotagging & Crowdsourcing

The well-loved San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection has 40,000 images online that can be searched by neighborhood, street, date, building, or by a person's name. The keyword searching allows one to discover some nitty-gritty details that were included in the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin news copy pasted on the backside of the photograph and added to the description of the image.  Yet, there is essential information missing from the description and this inspired a project for Old S.F. The project was to geocode 13,257 images in the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection.  Explore the geocoded images on Old S.F. by neighborhood, street or, at times, building and adjust the slider to change the display dates. Dan Vanderkam built the site and Raven Keller designed it.  Go explore and have fun.  Feeling inspired?  There are approximately 10,000 more images that can be geocoded from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection database.

San Francisco enthusiasts definitely enjoy sharing their geolocation knowledge about San Francisco as can be seen from the crowdsourcing project that  was inspired by the digitization of San Francisco History Center's San Francisco Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1905.  David Rumsey graciously digitized these historically valuable volumes for the San Francisco Public Library this summer.  Local blogger Burrito Justice shouted his enthusiasm about the digitization of the maps. Mike from Stamen responded with a geo-location alignment tool and hundreds of 1905 Sanborn Insurance maps have been matched to current maps of San Francisco.  There are still some more difficult maps to match!

The San Francisco History Center intends to use the geocoded data from Old S.F. in a partnership with Historypin.     

The Cool, Grey City of Love

[Fog over the Golden Gate, 1953.Courtesy of the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library.]

Spare sweater anyone? Confused about what season this is?  Seem like the summer fog is gloomier than usual?  The fog in this 1953 photo looks a lot like the fog of 2011.

And the weather of 1851 wasn’t much different from today’s either.  Albert Benard de Russailh's journal illustrates the old saw "there's nothing new under the sun" (no pun intended) with this description of San Francisco summer weather: "... every day at two o'clock a cold north-west wind rises...which compels you to put on warmer clothes...It is a kind of Mistral that lasts always until four or five o'clock."  Here’s a glimpse into his journal Last adventure: San Francisco in 1851:

Albert Benard de Russailh's LAST ADVENTURE: SAN FRANCISCO IN 1851.

The Cool, Grey City of Love as George Sterling so poetically put it and Herb Caen was so fond of quoting...what else is there to say?

"The Cool, Grey City of Love" by George Sterling, printed by John Henry Nash, 1932. Courtesy of the Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing, San Francisco Public Library.

Here’s a “Foggy Day” musical tribute guaranteed to warm you up; courtesy of Dinah Washington and the Alexander Street Press.

Don’t despair -- the heat of Autumn (our Indian Summer) is closer than you think. Really.

[Market Street with Twin Peaks in background, 1937. Courtesy of the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library.]

Letters to SF Police Department Chief During the 1968-1969 San Francisco State Strike

In this digital age, "historical" paper letters--with their physical immediacy here in the present--can have a visceral impact that corresponds to the highly-charged political issues they address. I had just such an encounter this week while sorting through a carton of San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) files marked simply "City Records--Police." I came across a packet of over 200 letters to Chief Cahill about the SFPD actions during the 1968-1969 strike, protests, and riots (or "disturbance," as noted below) at San Francisco State College. Almost all of the letters in this collection are in support of the SFPD, and their tone ranges from grateful to congratulatory to exhortatory. The few letters that express criticism of the police are striking in their scarcity. I'm posting here one "pro" and one "con," along with a typical formal response from the Chief's Office.














The letters were discovered as part of a larger project of arranging, describing, and publishing a finding aid to our entire collection of SFPD records, which consist of approximately 65 linear feet of Board of Commissioners journals, "mug" books, clippings scrapbooks, directives, wanted posters, and other material dating back to the 1880s. We'll keep you posted on the status of this project and offer further highlights as we progress. For access to the collection, please contact the San Francisco History Center.

Images courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

San Francisco Subject Cards

In between blogging, facebooking and tweeting, the San Francisco History Center staff has been working on an "old school" project. The subject card files-- which have been adoringly described in previous blog entries-- were moved from the back stacks, staff-only area into the reference room, so that researchers can have self-serve access to the cards.  On your next visit to the San Francisco History Center, please browse the subject cards, especially for the tactile experience of flipping through paper cards!   


The card files are an archive in and of themselves.  Upon creation of the San Francisco History Center in 1964 (then known as the Californiana Collection / San Francisco History Room), the Center inherited the San Francisco and California subject card file trays from the Reference Department.  The earliest subject cards are from the 1910s, when a hiring qualification was based on the quality of penmanship.

The handwritten cards are interfiled with the typed cards that have continued to grow over the last 100 years.  The cards include citations to newspapers, periodicals, and books.  Many times, a small clipping had been glued onto the card.

The subject cards cover general subjects such as associations, buildings, businesses, schools, restaurants, and transportation, but within each general subject are cards for individual hotels, businesses, restaurants, and MUNI lines. Before moving the cards into the reference room, hours were spent ensuring that the cards were in order, citations were legible, and that cards with oversize clippings folded into them were pulled out and incorporated into the San Francisco Ephemera Collection.    

Some of our blog readers may be regular users of our biographical card files; please note that these have been moved to the other side of the cabinet, opposite the subject cards. Now, when you want a break from pointing and clicking for San Francisco people, places, and things, you can visit the San Francisco History Center in person to rummage and rifle to your heart's content!

Back to School: Yearbooks

Polytechnic Journal, June 1935

It's that time again: school is appearing hazily on the late-summer horizon. In keeping with the season, the San Francisco History Center recently received a donation of Polytechnic High School yearbooks and ephemera from Martin H. Feibusch, a former student of the class of 1936. 

We acquire many, if not most, of our school yearbooks through similar donations from individuals. This means that copies are often personalized. Mr. Feibusch's copy of his 1935 yearbook is filled with autographs, drawings, and letters from classmates, commenting on the track team, Registry (if anyone knows what "Registry" is, please leave a comment), and geometry class. One can also get a sense of how people talked to each another then: "swell" was a complimentary adjective of choice that year.

Student Association ID, 1935

The Polytechnic ephemera includes a dance card, commencement tickets, student association I.D. cards, and event programs. Sports schedules and scores are on the back of the Student Association cards, so you can see that Poly beat Balboa 25-15 on Feb. 6, 1935.

The San Francisco History Center has yearbooks for over seventy San Francisco elementary, middle, and high schools and colleges. Come up to the 6th floor for a visit to look at more.

Student Association ID, reverse

 Commencement Exercises Program, 1937

All images courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.