history

Doors convey a lot about a building, according to architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson (British, 1795-1885). Whether it is the majesty and importance of public buildings or the beauty and convenience of a private dwelling, doors showcase the strength or weakness of any façade. Donaldson uses this book to survey doorways of a range of structures, including temples, pantheons, and houses. As a pioneer of architectural education, Donaldson was a founding member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Charles Alphonse Combes (1891-1968), born in Paris, moved to the Côte d’Ivoire in 1925 and never looked back. He began taking art students and in 1937 his studio became the École des Arts Appliques, the first art school in the country. It is now a museum in Abidjan, Musée Charles Alphonse Combes.

Ronald Cohen, architect and artist, was born in South Africa and later moved to London where he succeeded as an interior designer. On holidays, he traveled and painted widely in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, always drawn to different varieties of architecture.  “But then I discovered Cape Town,” he wrote, “and there I found absolutely everything to delight my senses—the wonderful clarity of the light, the expansive golden beaches, the granite rocks and the sparkling sea . . .

Despite dying at only 28, Edward M. Haight (1863-1891) established a busy career as an enthusiastic naturalist, collector, taxidermist, and publisher. The Golden State Scientist is one of three serials that he edited in the late 1880s, and it is by far the scarcest. This was the only issue ever published, and only 450 copies made it into print, owing to “the many blunders made in the advertisements." Only about a dozen copies survive in libraries today.

The Thompson Trophy air race (1929-1961) was an annual aircraft speed race with a course set up around pylons. It was an especially prestigious event during the great air race period of the 1930s. This unique limited-edition publication covers the year’s winners from 1929 to 1936.  It has a gold cover and colorful illustrations of the winning aircraft, which are beautifully preserved.  Each illustration of a winning aircraft was designed to be suitable for framing. The book is held together with a spiral binding that is a concern for future preservation.

This 1967 commemorative newspaper issue documented the 40th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis monoplane. It features photos of a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis and of pilot Frank Tallman, cofounder of Tallmantz Aviation, which built the replica. The replica was flown to Paris by the U.S. Air Force to be displayed during the 1967 Paris Air Show.

More than six decades before the Panama Canal, a trans-Isthmian railroad carried thousands of travelers every month between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Crossing in this manner represented a third option to people (and freight) traveling to California (recently added to U.S. territory as a result of the war with Mexico) from the eastern United States. They could now avoid the perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope as well as the long trek across the great plains and Rocky Mountains.

In 1870, Alvan Southworth, ever in pursuit of stirring adventure, went to Egypt as a correspondent for the New York Herald to report on the lavish court of its ruler, Ismail Pasha, and to investigate the upper reaches of the Nile. He soon realized there was a larger story: the state-sanctioned slave trade in Egypt’s territory of Sudan.

Observations over some Fragments of Ancient Glass Vases Ornamented with Figures Found in Rome Cemeteries is the work of Filippo Buonarroti (Florence, 1661- 1733), an early scholar of Etruscan art and antiquities, studying the collection in the family palazzo-museum, Casa Buonarroti. He made a study of the bottoms of Roman gold glass vessels that were used as grave markers on the walls around the burial niches of catacombs in Rome. Buonarotti included many illustrations of these decorated pieces and fragments of glass, many of them showing portraits of the gravesite owners.

Published in 1758, this rare work consists of numerous tables providing pricing and manufacturing techniques on a wide range of goods. In the first part, there is extensive information on the production of plate glass and mirrors, including instructions on grinding and polishing glass, re-purposing mirrors, convex and concave mirrors, colored glass, and other similar pursuits. Following these instructions are tables of prices and various measurements. The second part contains explanations of measurement calculations on a variety of goods and hardware.

Gather out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and cultural achievement among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, with New York City's Harlem neighborhood at its epicenter. The book is also based on a current exhibit of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

They say every book tells a story, and this one does not disappoint. Loves Garland, or Posies for Rings…contains a selection of posies, or love poems, that could be inscribed onto gold rings and given to a friend or lover as a testament of one’s affection. This edition of Loves Garland, published in 1883, is a reprint of a 1674 edition, which in turn is a reprint of the original 1624 edition.

In 2015, media outlets were abuzz with the news of the discovery of a sunken slave ship near the coast of South Africa. The Portuguese slave ship Sao José Paquete de Africa (often shortened to Sao José) began its journey in 1794 from Mozambique, heading to the cotton and rice plantations of Brazil with a cargo of roughly 500 African captives. The ship never reached its destination—as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope, it was ripped apart by high winds and sank just off the coast. Although the crew survived, 212 of the slaves drowned.

James Marshall, a foreman at Sutter’s Fort near Sacramento, accidentally discovered gold in January 1848 while building a sawmill. His discovery sparked the California Gold Rush. Approximately 300,000 people from across the country and around the world flocked to the region, hoping to make their fortunes. These gold-seekers were called the “Forty-Niners,” since the majority of them arrived during 1849. This book, by historian and nature writer Stewart Edward White, tells the story of California before, during, and after this pivotal period.

Searching for a book on the history of metals? Then look no further than John Wadsworth William Sullivan’s The Story of Metals. Published in 1951 by the American Society of Metals as part of the Series for Self-Education, The Story of Metals offers an accessible glimpse into the evolution of the use of metals from mining to metallurgy and minting.

Printed by John Edward Taylor in 1852, Arthur Ryland’s (1807-1877) Assay of Gold and Silver Wares provides insight on the development of legislative practices designed to protect and regulate the assaying and minting of gold and silver coinage—or to fight against the practice of counterfeiting. Ryland examines assaying practices in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and explores legislation and laws designed to protect lawful coinage and to punish individuals found guilty of counterfeiting.

After serving with the Texas Rangers in his late teens and early 20s, then studying for a career in medicine (in Kentucky), and then for the ministry (at Princeton), Charles Webber finally settled into journalism, writing for several literary reviews. Enticed by tales of gold and quicksilver in the country north of the Gila River in Arizona, Webber organized an expedition to the region, writing this and other books to promote it.

Though the California gold rush of 1849 is perhaps the most well-known, a major strike along the Klondike River in 1896 sparked one of the largest gold rushes in the history of North America. An estimated 100,000 prospectors flooded the Klondike region, located in the Yukon in northwestern Canada. This book, published in 1897, gave readers “authentic instructions” on how to reach Klondike, a remote region accessible only via the Yukon River.

This exhibition catalog explores the 2010 monumental work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, created by internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese artist and social activist Ai Weiwei. The work is a reimagining of a Qing dynasty zodiac water-clock system at the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, which was looted in 1850 during the Second Opium War. Ai reinterpreted the original fountainheads in a gold series and a bronze series, as his first monumental public art installation.

Whether romantic farces in black-and-white or western epics in Technicolor, movies from Hollywood's golden age were introduced to the world by entrancing posters. The Lost Artwork of Hollywood is a tribute to the illustrators and artists who created posters and other promotional materials to spark the imagination of the public. Focusing on movies of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the book contains over 100 images from film promotional materials, many of them full-page reproductions.

This volume was commissioned by the president of Costa Rica and published in 1902. The Comisión Conmemorativa de Costa Rica en el Siglo XIX worked with various authors to highlight the social history, local customs, and artistic contributions of Costa Rica during the 19th century. The book also covers the history of the Catholic Church in Costa Rica during this period. The goal of this volume was to highlight the many successes of Costa Rica following its independence. The cover depicts a silver angel holding aloft a burning torch inscribed with the Roman numerals XX (20).

This fun, interesting, and lavishly illustrated book tells the stories of approximately 50 animals that have played crucial roles in human history. Chaline’s fascinating essay topics range from the history of oyster-raising to the essential role of the horse. Humans are the subject of the final essay, which includes a warning that we are our own worst enemy. Each animal is classed among four categories as “Edible, Medicinal, Commercial, and/or Practical" (a dog-loving reader might quibble with the idea of modern housecats being considered “practical”).

John Randolph Spears (b. 1850) was a well-traveled journalist at turn of the century, eventually writing nearly a dozen books, primarily on nautical and maritime themes. This early title is about the land, sea, flora, fauna, and cultures of South America’s southernmost region. The “gold diggings” from the title are mostly done on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego, where, after heavy storms, gold shows up on the black sands. The quest for gold often creates conflicts with indigenous communities of the area, which Spears takes great care to describe with sensitivity (for the times).

In 2001, British artist Jeremy Deller received a residency from the CCAC Wattis Institute in San Francisco. He applied his honorarium toward a used Jeep and five acres of land in the Mojave Desert for $2000, thereby staking his own claim upon the Golden State. His fellowship resulted in an unorthodox but compelling guidebook tracing California’s history from the 19th century mining boom to the post-dot-com recession, as found along its dusty highways and in its roadside museums.

When thinking of the phrase “gold rush,” the words "California" or "Klondike" may come to mind. Well before prospectors traveled out west, many tried their luck in the mountains of the state of Georgia. Author David Williams sifts through many obscure resources and historical documents to paint a picture of the Georgia gold rush and its impact on the local Cherokee beginning in 1828 and throughout the subsequent decade.

The late-16th century was the golden age of Japanese screen painting, both literally and figuratively. The Momoyama period (1573-1615) was also an age of monumental architecture, with feudal lords building forts and castles of a size unprecedented in Japan. The great masters of the art of screen painting who were called upon to decorate the interiors of these large buildings filled them with screens of bold and innovative aesthetics, some with gold leaf covering their entire surfaces. Japan had a well-established tradition of incorporating gold leaf into art and decorative work.

Dejima, or Deshima, was a small fan-shaped artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan. During the Edo period (1615-1868), Dejima was the only place in which foreign traders were allowed to conduct business with Japan. It was originally built for Portuguese traders but was later used by the Dutch East India Company. In 1858, when Japan concluded the Treaty of Kanagawa with the United States, Dejima’s role as the only port of entry for the West was over. The island was expanded by reclaiming land, and it was merged into Nagasaki, thus obscuring the island’s original borders.