Bibliophemera

I usually write about a piece I've researched and can provide some history on, but this one is a stumper. Maybe someone out there will see this and have some information about it. This is an old trade card for a San Francisco bookseller and stationer, E.C. Thatcher and his business with the colorful name, Eureka Bazaar.   Looks like he sold a hodge-podge of items, not just books and stationery. With the shop name, proprietor's name, the address on Mission Street, you'd think I could turn up something on the Internet. Actually, I did get the following, which answers nothing and only creates more questions An 1888-89 Northern Pacific Coast Directory has this entry for Eureka Bazar (sic) at a different address in San Francisco (I presume, as the street address exists there today) with a different owner, a woman referred to as Mrs. Douglas: DOUGLAS MRS E A proprietress Eureka Bazar 1841 Fillmore res same Using all this information has produced not one iota...

On this date 46 years ago, July 18, 1965, a fire broke out in the building that housed the Tides Book Shop in Sausalito, California. The Associated Press wire photo below shows firefighters battling the upper-story blaze above the book shop, which resided below on the first floor. A crowd gathered to watch. The newspaper clipping on the backside of the photo offers some assurance that the book shop did not burn, but it could not escape water damage from the firefighters' efforts to save the building. How much damage occurred is uncertain from the information available at present. I acquired this photo to go along with another item I have from the Tides Book Shop. I certainly hope this is the only link the two have and that the shop's matches (not these) weren't in anyway implicated with the fire. That would have been too ironic a twist of fate! There's a good bit of history on The Tides , as it was known, in a local newspaper article reprodu...

Horace Mann gave the lecture. Miss Dana received this printed pamphlet of the lecture: Lecture on the Best Mode of Preparing and Using Spelling-Books, Delivered Before the American Institute of Instruction, August 1841 , by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Board of Education (Massachusetts), was published by William D. Ticknor in Boston, 1841. Here is what I have deduced from the printed copy at hand (and a little Internet research): Sometime during the following year, 1842, Miss Joanna E. Dana was preparing to teach school in West Dedham, Massachusetts's. A friend or colleague sent her a printed copy of this lecture to help her with her spelling instruction. Miss Dana evidently read the lecture and, being the literary person and teacher that she was, corrected an error she found in Mr. Mann's discourse. On page 20, in the paragraph that contains " the knotted cords of the Mexicans ," Miss Dana crossed out " Mexic " and wrote next to it in th...

A while back, I wrote about Leipzig booksellers and touched on the role agents, or commissioners, played as middlemen between the booksellers and publishers in that city as well as most of Europe. I recently acquired a postcard that depicts the place where these middlemen conducted their business. This is an image of the Buchhändlerbörse in Leipzig, circa 1910, which translates to The Booksellers' Exchange . The back is divided and blank. A bookseller's handwritten note certainly would have enhanced the history depicted on the front side. But the history is rich enough with the associated image of the Buchhändlerbörse on the front of the card. The German Publishers & Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels) offers on their Web site a history of their organization and mentions the Buchhändlerbörse, which seems more commonly spelled today with two words--Buchhändler-Börse. The Buchhändlerbörse  dat...

I haven't featured a bookplate, or ex libris, here in a good while, but here's one for which I have more questions than information to share. Henryka Raczyniewskiego was either a noteworthy Polish collector of ex libris or a collectible illustrator of ex libris. His collection, of which category I'm not certain, resides now in the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library's new Digital Library in Toruń, Poland: Kujawsko-Pomorska Biblioteka Cyfrowa . From the information presented, I can't answer the collector/illustrator question. The library's collections available thus far seem an impressive start for assembling ephemera representative of Polish culture and history, including the ex libris collection where I found the scant bit of information available on Raczyniewskiego. Presently, that's all the information I can find about him. Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will have additional information to share. As to whether he was a collector ...