"Printing At The Margins" Holiday Lecture with Kathleen Walkup: Dec.10th, 2pm

“The Press Feeder.”  Engraving by William Burns, from Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors, 1851.

There is a letterpress printing renaissance afoot:  Young people are flocking to the San Francisco Center for the Book to learn how to set type and make books. Letterpress note cards are appearing in shops everywhere--even at the Apple store, where you can buy a letterpress app for your iPhone. You can follow Kyle Durrie’s blog of her cross country trip in a letterpress-shop-in-a-van. There’s even a national organization called The Ladies of Letterpress.

"The Book Folder" from Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors.

There is no better time to highlight one of the library’s best-kept secrets: the Marjorie G. and Carl W. Stern Book Arts & Special Collections Center, which includes the Robert Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing and the Development of the Book. By the time the Library acquired Robert Grabhorn's personal printer's library in 1965, his collection included examples of almost every typeface, printer and publisher of note from the previous five hundred years. The collection has grown over the years and continues to support the study of typography, printing, papermaking and bookbinding.

Book Arts & Special Collections celebrates the holiday season with a letterpress holiday card and the annual Holiday Lecture.  Since 1995, we have featured a fascinating array of lectures by book arts experts, including Alastair Johnston, Carl Rohrs, David Mostardi, James Keenan, Alisa Golden, Peter Koch, Sandro Berra and Jonathan Aaron.  Past topics have included: typography, publisher Paul Elder, poster artist Rick Griffin, and vernacular folk lettering around the world. One year, Karen Zukor discussed book and paper repair; another year, Patricia Wakida spoke on the life and work of Shig Murao.

"The Book Sewer" from Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors.

Kathleen A. Walkup

This year we are proud to present Professor Kathleen Walkup of Mills College, who will talk about women and printing in a lecture titled Printing at the Margins: An Ink-stained History of Women & Work. Professor Walkup teaches courses on typography and letterpress printing, artists’ books, and seminars on the nature of the book. She is Director of the MFA Program in Book Art & Creative Writing at Mills College, the first program of its kind established in the USA.  Her interests include the history of women in print culture and conceptual practice in artists’ books. Her most recent curatorial project is Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop (Grolier Club, 2010).  Her lecture The Book Is A Public Place, part of Threads: Talk Series, can be heard at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound website.

"The Gold Leaf Packer" from Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors.

Mark your calendar: Saturday, December 10th, 2pm, Koret Auditorium, Main Library. Join your book arts community friends and colleagues to enjoy this illuminating talk by Professor Walkup and find out more about the “ladies of letterpress of yore.”

The Albion lives!

Above is a scan of the first thing printed on the Albion handpress at the San Francisco Public Library since we acquired it in 1999.  Many thanks to Fred and Barbara Voltmer, Alan Dye and Li Jiang for getting the machine in working order so that we could print this test proof today. A broadside printing event is being planned for February--more on that later. You are all invited.

Best Thanksgiving Wishes To All

Enjoy this "recipe" for Stuffing for Thanksgiving Turkey from Good Things by Isabel Goodhue, printed by Tomoye Press for Paul Elder & Company, San Francisco, 1911.

French Hospital and Nurses

With the season of school semesters, the San Francisco History Center has interns in the department working on special projects. What's on the 6th Floor? asked Lauren, San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection intern, to be a guest blogger and highlight a collection.


French Hospital Nurses by Lauren Gaylord

I never thought of nurses having all that much fun until I searched through a photo album chronicling just that. Turns out these guys and gals know how to have a good time. Two photo albums in the possession of the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection feature the hard-working staff at San Francisco’s French Hospital during the 1910's and 1920's - Agnes Fay Photograph Album (SFP 63) and French Hospital and Family Photograph Album (SFP 64). Though long gone and transformed into the Kaiser Permanente French Campus, the French Hospital was a powerful force in San Francisco medicine for over one hundred years.
Located for a time on Bush Street, and then on Bryant Street, it settled into its permanent location bordered by Geary Street, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, and Anza Street in the Richmond District around 1895. Though the origins of the French Hospital are traced to as early as 1851, a School for Nursing was not founded until the hospital moved to Geary Street. The training school became very popular among young women looking for as much of a career and independence as the early 20th century could afford. Many students passed through the school, as Three Years – French Hospital yearbooks for the years 1919 and 1921 can attest. Their difficult studies, however, did not stop these nurses-in-training from having a little fun! The yearbooks include rhymes, jokes, and ditties about the graduating class such as this one: 

Miss Sadie Klenzendorf, so stately and tall,
For her, it seems, all short men fall.   
Here's hoping in the future she'll marry a man 
Who can handle the rolling pin as well as she can.

French Hospital & Family Photograph Album SFP 64

There's also plenty of good old nurses' humor with sections called  "Hospital Alphabet," "The Bacteriological Ball," "Microbe National Convention," and "Our Ten Commandments."  

French Hospital & Family Photograph Album SFP 64

National Nurses Week might not be for another six months, but that does not mean we cannot honor the members of this hard-working profession year-round. Come up to the Sixth Floor, San Francisco History Center, to check out our French Hospital photograph albums and the School of Nursing's class yearbooks. You may request and view the photograph albums during the open hours of the Photo Desk. To sate an interest in the nursing profession in general, check out these titles:

Agnes Fay Photograph Album SFP 63

Bonnie Bullough's The Emergence of Modern Nursing, 1964

M. Adelaide Nutting's A History of Nursing, 1907-12


Thelma M. Schorr's 100 Years of American Nursing: Celebrating a Century of Caring, 1999

Patricia D'Antonio's American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work, 2010





 

So Long, Bil

Bil Keane. The Family Circus:
Daily and Sunday Comics, 1960-61 (2009), p. 224

News arrived today of the death of cartoonist Bil Keane. His single panel comic strip The Family Circus first appeared in newspapers around the country in the early 1960s.  The only reason I read the Philadelphia Bulletin was for the comics of course, and The Family Circus was a favorite. [Keane started there as a staff artist.] The shenanigans of Billy, Dolly, Jeffy (baby P.J. came later) and their witless canine companion Barfy, were all part of the Sunday ritual.

I still love the comics, and continue to read The Family Circus, mainly for the sweet nostalgia of a bygone time. This is the Bil Keane effect: he reminds us of the old days when we were young and still innocent. For a trip down memory lane, check out the daily and Sunday strips for 1960-1961 and 1962-1963 at the library.

Bill Keane. The Family Circus:
Daily and Sunday Comics, 1960-61 (2009), p. 60

For those of us who don't quite get The Family Circus or who live in a parallel universe, we offer The Dysfunctional Family Circus, a series of wildly inappropriate and funny comic zines available in the library's Little Maga/Zine Collection.

Get Out the Vote!

Cover, Statement of Vote, November 1916

In honor of Election Day today, November 8, we invite you to pause for a moment to remember voting-related City Records, collected here in the San Francisco History Center. We have two large collections of voting records--voter registration records and Statement of Vote--each of which holds its own electoral charms.

Index to Register, October 13, 1904

The Great Registers and Index to Great Registers are voter registration records that list the voter's name, address, age, political party, and occupation. Early Registers also include naturalization data, such as native country and date and place of naturalization. The San Francisco History Center has a handful of Great Registers of the City and County of San Francisco from the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, and 1890; and the Index to the Register for 1901-1964, with some gaps in coverage. Depending on the year, Great Registers and Index to Great Registers are available in paper and/or microfilm and are stored both at the San Francisco History Center and in off-site storage. Off-site records require 24 hours' advance notice for use, so please call ahead.

At the statewide level, California Voter Registers, 1866-1898 and California Voter Registrations,1900-1968 are available online in the library via our subscription to Ancestry.com. We have a paper version of California Voter Registration for 1890 on our genealogy ready reference shelf in the reading room. If you're a buildings researcher, you can search the California Voter Registrations by address to find out who lived there. 

Statement of Vote for the City and County of San Francisco

Page view of Statement of Vote, November 1916

compiles total number of votes by assembly district and for the city as a whole, for primary, general, special, and municipal elections. Pictured here is a detail from a page of the Statement of Vote for November 1916, 27th Assembly District. Among other proposed ordinances, number nine prohibits public speaking on streets, sidewalks, and public parks. There were more yays than nays in Assembly District 27, but the measure as a whole failed by 3309 votes: 65,446 Yes to 68,755 No.  

Like the Index to the Register, Statement of Vote is available in a variety of locations and formats, depending on the dates. Paper volumes are available from either off-site storage via the San Francisco History Center (for Aug. 1906-Dec. 1979) or from the Main Library's 5th floor Paging Desk (June 1970 - November 1992,  June 1993-November 1995, and 1997-2010); digitized Statements are available online from 1995 to the present.

So, if City Hall happens to be your voting place, pop over across the street to the Main Library before or after to take a look at voting records from days gone by. And as a bonus, ask us about Elections files in our San Francisco Ephemera Collection! That might be a blog post for another Election Day.

San Francisco History Center's Most Popular Collections in October

October's most requested archival collections (in order of popularity) -

San Francisco History Center

1. Hippies Collection
2. John F. "Jack" Shelley Papers (SFH 10)  
3. Alcatraz Indian Occupation Records (SFH 11)
4. Baldwin & Howell Records (SFH 17)
5. Jack Morrison Papers (SFH 24)

Hormel Center's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Archival Collections (accessed through the San Francisco History Center)

1. Harvey Milk Archives - Scott Smith Collection (GLC 35)
2. Lou Graydon Sullivan Papers (GLC 2)
3. Leonard Matlovich Papers (GLC 6) 
4. Randy Shilts Papers (GLC 43)

Leonard Matlovich receiving Bronze Star, 1966

Read Queerest. Library. Ever. Blog for more GLBT archival highlights.

Researching People: Death Records

Death certificate 696, San Francisco Department of Public Health, Aug. 1, 1904. Reel #9.

Keeping archival records is one way that San Francisco as a city remembers its dead. People use them every day to discover details and then piece together the big picture about their relatives, the famous, the infamous, and the obscure. In particular, archival records that document death as a life event hold a certain fascination and utility for researchers.

The San Francisco History Center has two large paper archival collections of death records, already fairly well-known, well-used, and featured on our blog: the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s Records, 1902-1956 (bulk 1906-1956) document deaths due to accident, suicide, or other "unnatural" causes. Halsted N. Gray – Carew & English Funeral Home Records, 1835-1931 (bulk 1850-1921) document the deaths, funeral arrangements, and sometimes burials handled by a handful of local mortuaries that were later absorbed into what is now Halsted N. Gray-Carew & English Funeral Directors.

There are two smaller collections of death records on microfilm that seem to be lesser-known by the general public, but they can be just as useful.

Death register, San Francisco Department of Public Health. Book "M," Aug. 1, 1894-June 30, 1896. Reel #3.

The first collection is a set of death registers and death certificates from the Department of Public Health, one of the few sets of city records to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. The original ledgers are still held at the DPH, but the San Francisco History Center has them on microfilm: six reels of registers and nine reels of death certificates. The registers date from 1865-1905; the death certificates span just five months, July 1-Dec.1, 1904. The registers list name, sex, age, race, occupation, birthplace, marital status, burial place, physician, undertaker, and place, date, and cause of death. The death certificates--a sample of which is pictured at the head of this post-- have been scanned and are now available on the Internet Archive.

To help you search these records, Barbara Ross Close and Vernon Deubler have alphabetized and abstracted them in San Francisco Deaths, 1865-1905: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records, published by the California Genealogical Society and available in the San Francisco History Center's reading room.

The second collection is a set of undertaker's registers and datebooks from the firm of J.C. O'Connor, 1882-1919. This sample page shows the names of the deceased, along with their places of burial and itemized list of funeral and burial accoutrements.

J.C. O'Connor undertaker's register, Nov. 9, 1882-Feb. 16, 1896. Reel #1.

 If you'd like to use these collections in person, or if you'd like to explore additional materials on people who have passed, please visit the San Francisco History Center in person during our open hours. For Medical Examiner's and funeral home records, please contact us 24 hours in advance so that we can pull the right books for you from off-site storage.

The blog team wishes our readers a safe, sound, and memorable Day of the Dead.

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