Calling All Lovers of California History

A virtual postcard from Executive Director, Anthea Hartig:

 

Show your love for the California Historical Society and all we do to keep California’s rich and vibrant history a relevant part of our future.

Please consider making a tax-deductible gift today.

Keep the love for history flowing.

William A. Leidesdorff Collection

These 1847 account books for Hawaiian and Indian sailors form a fascinating part of the California Historical Society’s William A. Leidesdorff Collection (MS 1277). Given to the Society in 1955 by Mr. and Mrs. K. K. Bechtel, they remind us of the ethnic and cultural diversity of early San Francisco, and the city’s historical interconnectedness with other Pacific Rim markets, even in the Mexican Period. (Leidesdorff himself was of mixed-race Dutch and West Indian ancestry.)

The accounts also provide a glimpse into the sailor’s life in pre-Gold Rush San Francisco, recording individual sailors’ names, dates shipped, wages advanced and earned, and goods used. Below are Leidesdorff’s accounts with the Indian sailor Simon and the Hawaiian sailor “Harry Oahu” – note that charges for grog and other goods appear to have been deducted from the men’s wages.

A finding aid for the collection, including a short biographical sketch of Leidesdorff, is available on the Online Archive of California: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c80k29kg/.

Marie Silva, Archivist & Manuscripts Librarian

Exaggeration Cards

Minnesota has Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. Florida has its gators, the world’s largest reptiles. And, of course, they say that everything is larger than life in Texas. But in California, home of the world’s tallest trees and an agricultural wonderland, it’s the plant life—cultivated or wild—that grows really, really big.

Image manipulations began long before the digital magic of Photoshop made it possible for everyone to become visual fantabulists and tellers of tall tales. A prime example can be seen in the exaggeration (tall tale) postcards that first appeared in Fresno in 1905. The appeal of outsized produce and livestock struck a chord throughout the West, where many printers began publishing “Bunyonesque cards utilizing props and darkroom legerdemain,” as Lewis Baer of the San Francisco Post Card Club has described the cards.

CHS’s exaggeration cards are pristine, never-scribbled-on, and never-mailed examples of the maker’s craft. They are mostly the productions of the San Francisco printer Edward H. Mitchell. Part of CHS’s Kemble Collections on WesternPrinting and Publishing, these and more postcards are accessible to researchers in the North Baker Research Library at our headquarters in San Francisco.

 

Type Specimens

This July the California Historical Society will welcome the Southern California Chapter of the American Printing History Association, meeting in San Francisco to coincide with the 2013 J. Ben Lieberman Lecture at the San Francisco Public Library featuring “Reproductive Arts in America: Lithography Challenges Letterpress; an illustrated talk with David Pankow.”

To celebrate we are sharing wonderful examples of type specimens from the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing. 

 

This bright and colorful sample comes from Wm. H. Page & Co.’s Specimens of Wood Type, published in 1868. The use of more than three colors, along with the addition of the gold color, makes this a particularly outstanding sample – and very fitting for Fourth of July celebrations!

 

Although the Kemble Collection has a special emphasis on printing and publishing in California and the West, the collection encompasses materials from all over the Western Hemisphere. Here is a type specimen from London’s Reed and Fox (late R. Besley & Co.) showing some of their more bold type fonts.

 

This delightful specimen from Marder, Luse & Co. of the Chicago Type Foundry demonstrates Grotesque and Old Style Ornamental fonts. These 19^th century fonts were primarily used for decorative purposes and not typically used in text. Not only do these fonts display a stylistic flair but the text reads like fragments of poetry and is not without a bit of commentary!

This sample from the American Type Founders shows colorful sectional initial formers that incorporate animals, floral and vegetable motifs. The American Type Founders Company was a merger of 23 type foundries across the United States. Their California locations included Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

 Although the San Francisco branch was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, it was replaced by a new five-story building at 820-822 Mission Street in 1907. 

 

The Continental Typefounders Association’s type specimen, published in 1930, shows a stylish type created by M. Cassandre. Cassandre operated a Parisian advertising agency, Alliance Graphique, and was known for his posters advertising travel and wine. He was also a typeface designer, creating the font Bifur in 1929.

To view any of these type specimens in the California Historical Society’s North Baker Library please ask for the following:

American Type Founders Company. Supplement to the American line type book. Boston, 1909.

Chicago Type Foundry. Specimen book of printing types, borders, brass rule, etc. furnished by Marder, Luse & Co. Chicago, 1874.

Continental Typefounders Association, Inc. Specimen book of continental types. New York, 1930.

Reed and Fox, Late Robert Besley & Co. Fann street letter foundry specimen book. London, 1873.

Wm. H. Page & Co.’s. Specimens of wood type. Greeneville, CT, 1868.

Jaime Henderson
Archivist

The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet, by Madame Lola Montez

Cataloged under the subject heading “Beauty, Personal” is this gem of nineteenth-century cosmetology: Madame Lola Montez’s The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet, published by Dick & Fitzgerald of New York in 1858.

The Irish entertainer’s advice ranges from the impractical to the outrageous, begging the question: did this famous beauty really intend to divulge the secrets of her charms, or does this book have another, hidden purpose? Is The Arts of Beauty an ironic feminist treatise, or did Madame Montez simply wish to poison the competition?

For those of us who suffer from premature graying, Madame Montez recommends an intoxicating blend of oxide of bismuth, spermaceti, and pure hog’s lard: “The lard and spermaceti should be melted together and when they begin to cool stir in the bismuth. It may be perfumed to your liking.”

Another chapter is devoted to “A Beautiful Bosom.” The subject is delicate, yes, but “why should not a woman be suitably instructed in the right management of such extraordinary charms?” Various preparations are recommended to promote the desired growth or reduction of the area; ladies are discouraged, however, from the dangerous practice of self-medicating with internal doses of iodine!

And, lest the woman so spackled with layers of animal grease, ambergris, and ammonia be accused of vanity, Madame Montez asks us to consider: “Preach to the contrary as you may, there still stands the eternal fact, that the world has yet allowed no higher ‘mission’ to woman, than to be beautiful.” The quotation marks round “mission” say all.

Marie Silva

Archivist & Manuscripts Librarian

Traveling in Style

These colorful vacation guides inspired 1940’s travelers to explore California in style. Use them to inspire your own California summer plans!

There is plenty more travel ephemera to inspire you – visit the California Historical Society’s North Baker Research Library to view ephemera from our California Ephemera Collection.

To view the travel guides ask for:

Robert Spiers Benjamin, The Vacation Guide. New York: Whittlesey House, 1940.

Blair Tavenner, Seeing California. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948.

Jaime Henderson

Archivist

National Dairy Month

June celebrates National Dairy Month! Originally started in 1937 as National Milk Month the tradition grew to celebrate all the contributions of the dairy industry including butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream in addition to milk.

Early dairying in California was rare. Cattle were prevalent but mostly used for beef, leather and tallow. Mission Indian women did make a soft cheese and butter that sustained missionaries in times of need but primarily the diets of the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries and the native population did not have the same great taste for milk, butter or cheese that came with the arrival of early pioneers from the Eastern states. Many families arriving in California from their overland journeys from the East brought along their family cow. In their new California home they continued the tradition of supplementing meals with milk, butter and cheese provided by their favored bovine.

In the 1850s Clara Steele settled with her family near San Francisco. She missed the delicious cheddar cheese she enjoyed back in Ohio made from a family recipe, so she hired an Indian man to help her wrangle the cattle grazing near her home. With the milk from these cattle she replicated the cheddar cheese she so loved. The results were so delicious that when she introduced the cheese to the San Francisco market it was an immediate hit! Clara, her husband Rensselaer and cousins Isaac, Edgar and George begin making and selling high quality cheese and butter and start one of the first commercial dairies in the United States, known as Steele Brothers. By 1857 the Steele Brothers were so successful they relocated to a 6,000 acre farm in Point Reyes to expand their dairy operation. In 1861 they purchased 15,000 acres in Santa Cruz County. Here is a tax receipt for the Steele Brothers Santa Cruz County property. Note the 7000 lbs. of cheese at a value of $280.00.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s dairying becomes less of a rustic enterprise and begins to rely on modernization to allow the booming industry to supply its customers with safe, quality products. Improved farming techniques such as extensive planting and irrigation of alfalfa nourished cows and improved production to meet the needs of the market. In the rapidly growing cities, dairy products could be delivered straight to the customers home or business.

 Modern dairying equipment such as cream separators, refrigerators, milking machines and even butter wrapping machines industrialized the dairying industry.

From the dairy industry’s early beginnings, in which a pioneer woman had to wrestle wild cattle just to get a good piece of cheddar, to California’s current status as the nation’s leading dairy producer, dairying has made a significant impact on the economy, landscape and tastes of Californians.

References:

California Milk Advisory Board. Two Centuries of Prominence and Personalities. (Available: http://www.californiadairypressroom.com/Press_Kit/History_of_Dairy_ndustry, accessed June 2011).

California State Parks. Guide to the California Dairy Industry History Collection. (Available: http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/1080/files/fa_456_001.pdf, accessed June 2011).

Jaime Henderson, Archivist

California Historical Society

The Motorist’s Luncheon

Slow Food, 1923

The Motorist’s Luncheon Book, May E. Southworth’s delightful little volume, harkens to an age before fast food chains edged the highways. Preparation for a road trip required more than assembling a few water bottles and gassing up the SUV.  She presents page after page of menus to ease the hunger pangs of weary road warriors.

As Ms. Southworth says on page 1,

“In assembling your outfit it is necessary that you have a wary eye on the ‘mess kit’ or you may find yourself, like the Peri, perishing just outside the gates of some woodsy paradise. These ‘eats’ of the motorist are a life-saving necessity and have grown to be too important a part of he equipment to be left to the hit-or-miss style of picking up any old thing that happens to be in the house.

The design of this little book is not recipes, but only an endeavor to lighten the burden of the one whose task it is to cater to these joy hampers and fill them full, for who ever knew a motorist to arrive except in a starving condition?”

Don’t leave home without … gherkins?

In concluding her introduction, she lists emergency supplies. Coffee, chocolate, cheese and crackers all seem good to me—but canned pineapple, gherkins, and pancake flour? She must have been quite the road-trip hostess!

Roadtrip Menus

There are menus to be prepared on the campfire, and cold picnics accompanied by hot beverages stored in a thermos, as well as cold picnics with cold beverages. The “chafing dish” section offers menus that would challenge this writer on the home stove, including, for example, chop suey with rice, buttered rolls, pickled broccoli, hot Ceylon tea and eclairs. And then there’s the chafing dish menu of Waldorf chicken, Dixie biscuits, sweet butter, shredded halibut and slivers of red button radishes served on lettuce leaves with mayonnaise, mocha cake, saline snowflakes, canned sliced peaches, scotch short cakes, loganberry juice combined with Napa Soda, praline almonds and salted pecan meats. 

No-Meat Fridays

For each section – campfire, thermos, cold, and chafing dish – there is also a Friday section, featuring fish but no meat.

      

Girth Control

Finally, from the nothing-new-under-the-sun department, the back jacket cover includes an advertisement for another book also published by Harper & Brothers:   

To see the book itself, visit the California Historical Society’s North Baker Research Library and ask for: May E. Southworth, The Motorists’s Luncheon Book. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923.

Eileen Keremitsis
Reference Staff

Kemble Ephemera Collection

The California Historical Society has recently made available a finding aid to our extensive Kemble Ephemera Collection on the Online Archive of California.  The collection, dating from 1802 to 2013, comprises a wide variety of ephemera pertaining to printing practice, culture, and history in the Western Hemisphere. Here is only a very small sample of some of the ephemeral materials found in the Kemble Collection. 

A.C. Studios, Designers, Lithographers, Illustrated Map Makers, Oakland, California

Types from Solotype, Oakland, California

The Stanley-Taylor Company, San Francisco, California

Crown Zellerbach Corporation, San Francisco and Los Angeles, California

View the Kemble Ephemera Collection finding aid HERE.

Entry by Jaime Henderson, Archivist at CHS

Roar back to 1920s Hollywoodland

These unique photographs document real estate development in the hills and canyons of Hollywood, Los Angeles. Newly built homes and roads under construction dramatically altered the landscape of the fast-growing metropolis from 1924 to 1929.

 

For more information on these photographs and the complete record, click here.