Type Tuesday

Welcome to Type Tuesdays! Each Tuesday we will feature materials from the California Historical Society’s Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing. Today we offer a selection from typographer Dan X. Solo’s typeface calendar from 1972. 

Dan X. Solo of Oakland had an obsession for type. He didn't start out that way, though having a middle initial "X" probably tuned him into the oddities of the alphabet from an early age. He was first of all a stage magician. He had a rich deep voice and a waxed mustache that made him look the part. He had worked as a radio announcer beginning in World War II but after 20 years wanted a less hectic life, so he decided to fall back on his hobby of collecting antique typefaces. To support his hobby he made proofs of 1000 metal typefaces and sent them to ad agencies. His timing was perfect: after the uniform dullness of the 1950s, there was a growing interest in using Victorian types in advertising work. On the East Coast there was Morgan Press with their wood type collection and T. J. Lyons who also made repro-proofs for advertising. Within a decade Solo had amassed over 6000 fonts of type, but he made a wise move. Rather than proofing the types, some of which were badly worn or missing characters, he converted them to film. This way he wouldn't run out of sorts and could provide crisp camera-ready art more easily. Soon his types were widespread and he began sending complete alphabets to Dover Books who produced whole series of books of Victorian alphabets, Art Deco alphabets, quaint cuts, etc. from the Solo collection.

To view more Dan X. Solo material, visit the North Baker Research Library at the California Historical Society. 

Alastair Johnston and Jaime Henderson

The Eucalyptus in California

While many voices are heard about the future of Eucalyptus trees in urban California, I looked at a book from the time these trees were first planted here. Ellwood Cooper from Santa Barbara published a book in 1876 (“The Only Reliable Work on the Blue Gum Published in the United States”) entitled Forest Culture and Eucalyptus Trees (San Francisco: Cubery & Co.), pictured here:

Cooper grew 50,000 young trees at his home “Ellwood” and lauds their fast growth and height. Cooper calls them “Fever Trees” and suggests they “possess qualities which place it transcendentally above all other plants; … rendering localities healthy in which to sleep a single night was almost certain death. Useful in all the Mechanical Arts and in the industrial purposes of life. Large trees can be grown in a few years.” He seems to subscribe to the miasma theory of disease when proposing Eucalypti as healing agents.

While these trees were found useful by California farmers and ranchers who used them as windbreaks (you can still see them as you drive down Highway 101), perhaps not so much by the Southern Pacific which wanted cheap wood for  railroad ties. Cooper's book has an evangelical tone familiar to American readers in the late nineteenth century when Nature was bent to man’s hand through science. Many such well-intentioned attempts have backfired since those days and left us with present controversies.

Will Murdoch

Cataloger

Porch Swing

Warm September days beg for evenings on the porch. And what better way to slide from summer into fall than with a porch swing. 

If you get busy now, you can construct your own from these plans and be ready to recline by Labor Day.

Willing to take on this porch swing project or interested in handcrafting your own Mission Furniture? This beautifully illustrated Popular Mechanics handbook will show you how!

California Art Gallery and Museum Ephemera Collection

Check out the California Historical Society's newest addition to their California ephemera collections - the California Art Gallery and Museum Ephemera Collection!

John Bolles Gallery, San Francisco, The Visitors show, 1961

This collection consists of a variety of ephemera pertaining to California art galleries, art museums and college art museums. The collection comprises advertisements, announcements, brochures, exhibition catalogs, invitations and posters promoting gallery and museum shows primarily in San Francisco, the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Types of art represented include painting, photography, sculpture, ceramic and glass art, textiles and mixed media.

Batman Gallery, San Francisco, Works by Bruce Conner, [1964]

Many 1960s-era contemporary art galleries are represented such as Arleigh Gallery (San Francisco), Batman Gallery (San Francisco), Dilexi Gallery (San Francisco), Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles), Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles), John Bolles Gallery (San Francisco) and Maxwell Galleries (San Francisco) as are the exhibition catalogs of major California museums such as the Oakland Museum and the Palm Springs Desert Museum.

Everett Ellin Gallery, Los Angeles, Clayton Pinkerton show, 1961

View the finding aid to the collection at the Online Archive of California or search the California Historical Society's catalog. 

Jaime Henderson
Archivist

A Tube Across the Golden Gate

The history of a city can be imagined in many ways: as an upward trajectory of successful collective endeavor, as a simmering cauldron of bitter class conflict, or as a landfill piled high with abandoned projects, doomed utopias, and broken dreams. Tossed into the dustbin of history (and sometimes deposited in the CHS archives), the record of these failures tells the story of a different city, the city that might have been. Some of these “unbuilt” landscapes are poignant, others are disturbing, still others are simply bizarre, but they all remind us that history—and the view from our window—could have been something very different.

Architect M.G. Bugbee’s 1921 notebook, A tube across the Golden Gate, tells one of these stories, in graceful sketches accompanied by handwritten technical notes. As the need for a transportation link between San Francisco and Marin County became more obvious, Bugbee proposed the construction of an underwater concrete tube reinforced by steel cables, as pictured below:

 A tube across the Golden Gate, 1921, by M.G. Bugbee, MS 251, California Historical Society, MS 251.002.

When we think Golden Gate, the brilliant image of our internationally beloved bridge sweeps into view, emerging from and dominating the natural landscape. It’s hard to imagine the city detached from its man-made, fog-swept icon. Technical questions aside, Bugbee’s plan might suggest an alternate vision of urban planning for the Bay Area, one that is more modest, less triumphalist, and, perhaps, for better or for worse, more twenty-first century.

Marie Silva, Archivist & Manuscripts Librarian

Salad Days

Experiencing a deluge of tomatoes? Need to find some variety in your lettuce salads? Ever wonder what exactly is a “suspicion of garlic” – is it more or less than a ¼ teaspoon, finely grated?

Enjoy reading (if not actually trying) some recipes of years past from the second edition (1911) of Two Hundred Recipes for Making Salads with Thirty Recipes for Dressings and Sauces by Olive M. Hulse, printed at The Hopewell Press on Jackson St., San Francisco.

Recently reprinted by several publishers in 2009 to 2012, none of the available editions have such lovely covers as the one in our Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing.  

Mayonnaise dressing, anyone?

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