The Los Angeles Triforium Turns 40

The Triforium today with City Hall in the background, Los Angeles, December 2015

Courtesy of Jessica Hough

“Just as the Statue of Liberty made the Port of New York the most memorable symbol of America in the 20th Century, so now the TRIFORIUM’s astronautical beacon, a triad of rotating laser beams soaring into outer space, can make Los Angeles the first city to lead America into the 21st Century.”–Joseph L. Young

Type Tuesday - Black Letters from Francis Hart and Company

Today we feature pointed texts and black letters from the printing office of  Francis Hart and Company, New York. For a closer look at these specimens, take a look at the CHS page on Behance, featuring these and other materials from our Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing. 

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

This Day in History: The Bombing of Pearl Harbor—Defending the Country, Confronting Fears

Troops in Vehicles Lining Crissy Field, 1941

Courtesy of National Park Service

In the recent controversy over Syrian refugees, some Americans have likened refusal to provide the refugees a haven in the United States to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Type Tuesday - International Typeface Corporation specimens

A recent donation of International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets has so impressed me with their bold colors and stylistic fonts that I thought I would share a few over the next few weeks. 

International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was started in New York in 1970, making it one of the first foundries to have no history in the production of metal type. Instead, ITC designed, licensed and marketed typefaces for filmsetting and computer set types. 

ITC's journal U&lc (Upper and Lower Case) features an advertisement and order form for each of the ITC specimen books. Although the Kemble Collection's holdings include most of these specimens, I do spot some unfamiliar specimens featured in this ad.

What delightful specimens to be on the lookout for!

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Type Tuesday - Mead Paper advertisements

Today we showcase a few Mead Paper advertisements from the early 1950s. These advertisements were originally featured in Better Impressions, the journal of the Mead Corporation, a paper company dating back to 1846.

70 Years Ago Today: World War II Incarceration Camp at Manzanar Closes

Carol Highsmith, Guard Tower at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 2013

Library of Congress

On the bitter cold, wind-swept desert floor in 1969 there occurred an event of the profoundest and most singular importance. In retrospect, that morning and the whole of that day assume for me and for vast numbers of Japanese Americans the proportions of a mystical experience, the rebirth of a whole generation of Americans who were wronged by events that took place over a quarter century before.

 - Edison Tomimaro Uno, 1971, in Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans

In 1972 the California Historical Society opened a landmark photographic exhibition titled Executive Order 9066. At the time, the 1942 government order cited in the exhibition’s title, and the imprisonment of Japanese residents from the West Coast in so-called “internment camps” during World War II, was virtually unknown outside the Japanese community. Within the community, the subject was rarely spoken of—a source of shame and tragedy for the families involved. As the Densho Encyclopedia has observed, with the opening of the exhibition and the publication of its eponymously titled book—part of a resurgence of interest in the topic in the 1970s inside and outside the Japanese American community—the era of silence would end.

The Golden State and the City of Light

France and California have a long and historic relationship, which began in the 18th century when French artist Gaspard Duche de Vancy traveled to California by sea, later painting the landscape of the future state in 1786.  In 1832 Jean-Louis Vignes purchased 104 acres of land between the Los Angeles Pueblo and the Los Angeles River, where he established a successful vineyard, becoming California’s first commercial winemaker.  In the mid-1840s the first French Consulate was established in Monterey.

Type Tuesday - La Fondografica

Today we feature type from an international type foundry - La Fondografica, from Torino, Italy. 

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Dashing Dungeness Dreams

The delayed start of crab season in the San Francisco Bay Area due to toxins from an algae bloom has denizens of the delicious Dungeness near tears. Late fall crab feeds are practically part of the DNA of many northern Californians.

An Ode to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge [East from Yerba Buena Island, ca. 1934-35], photographed by Ted Huggins, courtesy, California Historical Society, CHS 2011.737

On the evening of November 14, 1936, in celebration of the opening of the new Bay Bridge, a grand parade was held on Market Street, complete with a “history of bridges” theme. Everything from “man’s first bridge” to Paris’ Pont Neuf was featured in the cavalcade. To have finally linked the East Bay with San Francisco was a momentous occasion, to be sure.