“On mesa and valley floor and treeless loma, the mantle of vivid green is overlaid riotously with color — the orange of California poppies; the blue and lavender of sturdy lupines and lolling wild heliotrope; the mauve of owl’s clover; the pale gold of sun-cups...
"I cannot protest the blackness that you are I cannot portray the blackness that you see I can only live the blackness that is me I cannot return to places I've not been I cannot profess a suffering not my own I can only come to you the black I...
“If one wanted to find an absolute beginning point, a creation story, for California’s two greatest transformations of the world, these experiments with horse and camera would be it." — Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (2003) "Arrangement of the cameras for taking the illustration of the paces" The...
Pioneers, for whom history was walking through dead grass, and the main things that happened were miles and the time of day – Traveling Through the Dark William Stafford (1914-1993) New York: Harper & Row, 1962 PS3537 T143 T7 1962 Poet William Stafford was born and raised in Kansas,...
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row John Steinbeck (1902-1968) New York: The Viking Press, 1945 First edition, second state PS3537 T3234 C3 1945 Cannery Row is a Depression-era...
A vivid belt of blue lightning flashed down through the blackness, and for a moment every outline of cliff and forest forms, and the rushing clouds of snow and sleet, were lighted up with a cold, pallid gleam. …In the moment of lightning I saw...
Last year, on May 22, Rare Books lost our dear friend, Marie Christensen Dern. On that day, like the rest of the world, we were sheltering in place. We were locked out of our office, and more disorientingly, out of the Rare Books Vault. We...
from California: The Land of the Sun, 1914, Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) We had not gone far from this village when the fog cleared off, and we enjoyed the delightful prospect of the ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of all our anxieties....
Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone. And the face of the deep is frozen --Book of Job 38: 29-30 Carte de l'amérique corrigée, et augmentée Petrus Bertius (1565-1629) Paris?,...
“A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building to make it stand.” – Mark Twain The Central Pacific Railroad: A Trip Across the… New York: T. Nelson and sons, 1870 F594 C46 This is one in a series of pictorial guide-books published by T. Nelson and...