Rare Book Monthly
What Book Collecting Becomes
History is in the details.
For someone looking to identify, study and possibly collect such material here is your starting point. No one else in the world may do this but you can: ditto for every other idea large and small. The history of church architecture begins to come into view in just a few searches. So too does Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and San Juan Hill. These days such searches often begin with personal connection such as letters mailed home from the front in World War One. Where was great grand Dad anyway and what about his story of meeting Grandma who was a nurse in Thierville-sur-Meuse? From such searches curiosity is peaked, researches begun and collections of mixed materials eventually built. Mixed? Books, manuscripts and letters, medals [Le Croix de Guerre], ephemera and maps: they all fit. It's hardly a book collection but books will find their place. Such endeavors may simply provide pleasure, some explain events, some build personal history and family heritage, others lead in the direction of more traditional collecting, to the accumulation of objects widely appreciated and valued. Whatever it leads to such efforts are continuously transformed and defined by the new way of seeing subjects and materials: through concentric circles of relevance that constantly evolve. Traditional collecting, the equivalent of pictures on a wall is now becoming the shark in constant motion.
Motivations for research and collecting have always been diverse but never before has the researcher/collector had complete control over the definition of the collecting field. Almost always in the past dealer knowledge and bibliographies defined the possible. Today the only limit to research and collecting is imagination.
Consider this example.
A set of the intake records for San Quentin Prison in Marin County, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. This is a set of sequentially numbered pages beginning with sheet 1 and continuing to 833 including details about each prisoner. These records, perhaps one of 2 to 4 sets, were prepared for law enforcement and possibly for San Quentin itself. They span the years 1909 into 1912, are mounted three to a page [11 x 14"], were originally bound into books but are now housed sheet by sheet in archival wraps and divided into four cases, each containing more than 100 leaves, mounted on two sides, printed, typed, many noted in hand and almost all with an "intake" photograph [2.75 x 3.25"]. The handwritten notes suggest these records remained within the prison or in the hands of enforcement well into the 1930s.
San Quentin was both a state prison and the local option for many of San Francisco's cases. It was, to quote Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet forty years later, "Full of people hard to understand." With this article is a database, created from these records, of all the men and women logged into San Quentin who passed through the San Francisco court system during this four year period. Intake photographs for each prisoner, apparently taken almost immediately after arrival, are affixed to each record. They are the blue links. Comparison of sentence with the appearance of the prisoner is telling.
