Hosted/Organized by: Book Club of California With over 400 officially designated local, state, and national landmarks, San Francisco is steeped in history. The city’s neighborhoods feature unique buildings and special places, some that are well known to residents and tourists but also structures and locations that have been obscured by time. Beginning at Captain Richardson’s […]
Book trade historian Charles Nelson Johnson provides a fresh look at lesser-known Southern California antiquarian bookseller Alice Parsons Millard (1873-1938)—a role she inherited as much as chose—and her activities as she courageously maneuvered her way through the decidedly male dominated trade in 1920s-1930s Europe and the United States; her personal challenges, creative business innovations and […]
Letterpress print your own broadside on the Book Club’s Columbian hand press with Li Jiang, Lemoncheese Press. A limited number of broadsides will be printed.
Diane Power Zimmerman will share highlights from her book Nut Tree: From a California Ranch to a Design, Food, and Hospitality Icon. As the oldest granddaughter of the founders of a famous northern California roadside destination, Nut Tree, Power Zimmerman is uniquely poised to tell the story of a twentieth century icon. The real story […]
Collecting more than 200 stunning photographs in one volume, A Country Called California: Photographs 1850s to 1960s traces the development of the Golden State from the nineteenth century on, through to its emergence as the fifth-largest economy in the world—all as seen through the eyes of photographers whose names are synonymous with fine art photography: […]
Historian, writer, and collector Hubert Howe Bancroft sold his expansive collection of research materials on the history of Western North America to the University of California in 1905, thus establishing the eponymous library as a center of historical research and scholarship on Western Americana. This presentation explores over a hundred years of collecting at The […]
The saying goes, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” but what if the community’s words could be printed and freely shared…Thea Sizemore of Kavamore Press is doing just that. Join us for an uplifting talk with Thea Sizemore about a social print project that is geared toward elevating the […]
Is it possible that (once again) everything we know is wrong? Well, in regards to the history of neon, this may well be the case. Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein have penned a brief, but concise history of the neon sign beginning at the beginning, and covering scandals, murder, fascists, and forgotten inventors. A full-color, […]