The seven known stamps used by Elder & Shepard and Paul Elder & Company
Updated 22 August 2025
Pick up a book that was sold at Paul Elder’s bookshop, and open to the inside back cover. Quite often, in the lower-left corner, you will find—for want of a better term—a “postage stamp.” The size of an actual postage stamp and moistened in the same manner, they were affixed to many if not most of the books sold in the shop: not just Elder’s own publications, but all the other books too. They were probably affixed by the cashier at the till while wrapping up the book.
The earliest known stamp (A) dates from 1899, before Elder and Shepard began to use the tomoye. The significance of the arrow-and-seahorse design is unknown. At this time, Elder was still calling himself “D. P. Elder.”
Elder and Shepard began using the tomoye design in 1900, principally on the title pages of their publications. The earliest known example of the first tomoye stamp (B) is from 1901.
Stamp C dates from 1902, when Elder began calling himself “Paul Elder.” This stamp was discovered in 2023 and is known from just this one example.
The Santa Barbara and San Francisco stores each had its own stamp, also known from just one example, now labelled D and E. The New York store may also have had a stamp, but this has not been seen.
Stamp F, featuring a tomoye surrounded by delicate tracery, had the longest lifespan; it has been seen as early as 1911, and as late as 1946.
By the 1950s, much had changed. Paul Sr. died in 1948, and Paul Jr. moved the bookstore to the corner of Sutter & Stockton. The company now used self-adhesive stickers (G) with a decidedly modern look to match the decidedly modern store.
If you liked How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers, then you’ll love Animal Analogues. That’s what Paul Elder thought too, and so in 1908 he published Robert Williams Wood’s sequel to similar acclaim. As any author can tell you, sequels are notoriously difficult to write, but Wood pulled it off, with poetry and drawings to delight old and young alike.
The cover says “Denatured Series No. 24”, but the series began with How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers as #23, and Wood wrote no further books in this series.
As with animated cartoons, the best children’s books are ones that satisfy both the children and the adults. Paul Elder published a number of innovative children’s books, but perhaps the most delightful is How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood, which appeared in 1907.
There is no traditional typesetting in the book; everything was drawn and lettered by Wood. Each page contains drawings of a bird (for example, the catbird) and a flower (the catnip), plus an amusing poem on how to distinguish them. It’s a perfect bedtime storybook.
The California quail is said
To have a tail upon his head,
While contrary-wise we style the Kale,
A cabbage head upon a tail.
It is not hard to tell the two,
The Quail commences with a queue.
Alternate binding of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955) was a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University from 1901 until his death. He specialized in optics and has been described as the “father of both infrared and ultraviolet photography”. In 1903, Wood invented an optical filter glass which allows ultraviolet and infrared light and pass through, but blocks most visible light. He used this special glass to make a device called a “Wood’s lamp,” for use in dermatology to diagnose certain skin conditions which fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Today we call these lamps “black lights,” though because of technology improvements black lights now use different filter materials in the glass.
Title page of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Although the cover says “Nature Series No. 23”, that name was concocted for this book and there are no earlier titles. Wood subtitled his 1908 sequel Animal Analogues as “Denatured Series No. 24.”
Instead, Wood co-wrote two prescient science fiction books with Arthur Cheney Train. The first, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915), is known for describing the effects of an atomic explosion thirty years before the first atomic bomb was created. Its sequel, The Moon Maker (1916), describes interplanetary space travel, including a plan to send a spaceship to destroy an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth.
Update, April 2017: In 1917, Dodd, Mead and Company copyrighted a new edition entitled “How To Tell The Birds From The Flowers, and Other Wood-cuts.” Your editor has seen a 19th edition of this title from 1939, so it was clearly a very popular title for Dodd Mead. Paul Elder was still publishing his own books in 1917, and it’s unclear how he lost the publishing rights.
Page 16-17 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Page 20-21 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Page 28 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about 19th-century tombstones turning up on Ocean Beach. Passers-by were puzzled, if not uneasy. “Why are there tombstones on the beach?” they asked. Perhaps they also stopped to say “Now that I think about it, why are there no cemeteries in San Francisco?” The answer is: there used to be, but not any more. Of San Francisco’s 27 historical cemeteries, only two (at Mission Dolores and the Presidio) remain: the rest were moved to Colma. The long, slow process began in 1900, when the City passed an ordinance forbidding new burials in San Francisco, and completed in the early 1940s, when the last graves at Laurel Hill Cemetery were transferred to Colma.
Laurel Hill Cemetery c1890, with Lone Mountain in the background
The reasons behind the move were many. Many people didn’t want to live next to a graveyard; others felt land values were lower near cemeteries. Many in the 19th century still believed that miasma, polluting vapors emanating from decay, caused disease. Developers were happy to play on these fears, as they wanted the land for residential and commercial use. Opposing the removals were religious groups—primarily the Catholic Church—and preservationists, who noted the lengthy list of San Francisco pioneers buried there.
The Richmond District in 1938. Laurel Hill Cemetery is at center left. Removal of the burials has just recently begun.
Although the city of San Francisco paid for moving the coffins, the families had to pay the cost of moving the headstones and monuments. Many if not most could not afford this, so the city took the stones and used them in very unromantic places: some as paving materials for gutters lining the walks of Buena Vista Park, others for Ocean Beach and the breakwater near the St. Francis Yacht Club. Particularly saddening was the loss of the large crypts and Egyptian-style monuments, most of which were unceremoniously dumped into San Francisco Bay.
In 1937, Paul Elder published a pamphlet called Laurel Hill. It was part of the last gasp of resistance from those who opposed the move. The text begins with an unsigned article entitled “Laurel Hill: Esto Perpetua! Have Not Our Pioneers Their Rights?”
We are in receipt of communications, from time to time, from a group that seems bent upon the destruction of Laurel Hill Memorial Park, wherein emphasis is placed on the statement that no real estate considerations are prompting the attempt. It is good to hear this, but difficult, assuming the fact is so, to understand what other motives are prompting the drive to destroy one of our most cherished historical landmarks. Is it possible that San Franciscans of the present generation include some who object to honoring our pioneer dead? Does the presence in our midst of cemetery reminders of mortality irk certain persons who feel the life current pulsing warmly?
Next is “An Open Letter to the Board of Supervisors, from ‘An Old Timer'”
We feel that the final passage of an ordinance directing the transfer somewhere beyond the county line of the venerated dust of the makers of our history is quite too brutal in its finality … Unlike the western reaches of this burial ground, the eastern part that confronts the passerby on Presidio Avenue is beautiful, it is lovingly tended, it is the Stoke Pogis of San Francisco, and its tombs bear names that explain why San Francisco became a great city. Gentlemen, you must know—because you have had every opportunity of knowing—how many of our United States Senators, how many of our Governors, how many of those others who made our beloved city, lie at rest in those few acres—in the fine old phrase, in God’s acre.
The William B. Bourne monument at Laurel Hill
After several more unsigned articles, the text concludes with twelve pages of names copied from headstones and monuments at Laurel Hill. The list is by no means complete, since over 47,000 people are known to have been buried there. Only this section of the pamphlet has page numbers, and the numbers begin at “65”, suggesting that this pamphlet is an excerpt of a longer work.
Later in 1937, the Catholic Church removed its opposition to the removal of Laurel Hill’s Catholic section, and the cemetery’s fate was sealed. The last graves were moved in the early 1940s.
Cover of the 1903 first edition of "Songs of Content"
In April 1903, Ralph Erwin Gibbs was at his desk in his study when he heard a loud crack: a tree was falling over in his yard. Knowing his pet dog was out in the yard, he rushed outside to save it, but was himself killed by the falling tree. He was just 27 years old.
Gibbs earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science at the University of California, Berkeley but became more interested in literature and poetry, and soon turned to writing full-time. In 1900 he became an assistant at the University Library and in the English department, where he became a protege of Charles Mills Gayley (1858-1932), professor of Classics and English. After Gibbs’s death, Gayley received the family’s permission to gather up the manuscripts and publish them. He also wrote a moving introduction to both Gibbs and his poetry.
Ralph Erwin Gibbs (1876-1903)
The book was republished in 1911 with the identical text but higher quality binding and imported laid paper.
Title page of 1st edition "Songs of Content"
Cover of the 1911 second edition of "Songs of Content"
