Back to School

Illustration from the 1930 yearbook of The White Mortar Board, published by the Senior Class of the University of California Training School for Nurses in San Francisco, California, recently donated by Ron Filion (visit his website at www.sfgenealogy.com/sf).

The first week of school, which for San Francisco public schools is this week, can be an emotional time, evoking feelings of dread and excitement. Naturally, such feelings can influence our reading choices: the pool-dampened copy of Entertainment Weekly, for example, gives way to an overly-highlighted used copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
To help facilitate this seasonal transition from leisurely to scholarly reading, I'd like to highlight some school-related materials available for use here in the San Francisco History Center. What follows is a short-list of Autumnal, rather than Summer, reading favorites:

• San Francisco Unified School District records. At over 100 linear feet, this collection is an archival tome more vast than a William Vollmann novel (well, maybe not quite that vast) The finding aid (aka guide to the collection so you know which boxes to request from storage) is a veritable novella in and of itself.
• School yearbooks. Besides nursing schools (represented above), we also have year books from middle schools, high schools, and vocational schools.
• 100 years of Mechanics' Institute of San Francisco, 1855-1955. A tradition of technical education in a classical setting, plus a chess club. At 46 pages, it'd be a beach read if you could take it out of the reading room. Read it here in the SF History Center with the table light on.
• Alphabet books. Book Arts and Special Collections has a slew of them. Watch for a full-length blog feature on them, coming soon.