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Holiday Books from Jones Book Store in Los Angeles - 1909

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More than one hundred years ago--1909 to be exact--somebody probably enjoyed browsing new books in this holiday catalog from Jones Book Store in Los Angeles. Today, I am enjoying browsing the antiquarian selections from this now old catalog. But it is one of the best preserved old bookseller catalogs of this vintage I've run across. Lest the catalog reader be confused by the title about what kinds of books Jones' Bookstore was selling, they were not books about Christmas, the image above being the lone title. Most books appearing in this catalog seem to deal with exotic lands around the world, travel, history, biography, and a smattering of juvenile and religious works. Popular novelists of the day were not excluded either, as evidenced by the books of Jack London, shown below (featuring Martin Eden). Just last month, I got acquainted with Jones' Bookstore through an article by another old-time Los Angeles bookseller, Ernest Dawson , in his remi...

Los Angeles Booksellers of 1897 (and their labels)

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Los Angeles bookseller, Ernest Dawson , wrote an article in 1947 for The Quarterly for the Historical Society of Southern California-- Los Angeles Booksellers of 1897 (Volume XXIX, No. 2, June 1947). That article was reprinted that same year in the 12-page booklet below, by Saunders Press in Claremont, California. The Saunders Press, by the way, was operated by Ruth Thomson and husband Lynne Saunders. Getting a bit off topic, researching Saunders led to this interesting article on the history of women in printing . Ruth Thomson Saunders also designed bookplates, some of which are featured in Knox College's The Art of The Book exhibit . Back to the Los Angeles booksellers... In 1947, the author, proprietor of Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles, took a look back at the bookselling scene in Los Angeles as it existed when he first arrived in that city in 1897. He states in the opening paragraphs that Los Angeles had at that time "three good new bookstores ...