One hundred years ago on February 20th, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened its doors to the public. Although it was marketed as a celebration of the newly-opened Panama Canal, its larger purpose was to the show the world that San Francisco had fully recovered from the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. The fair was huge, constructed on a 635-acre strip of land along San Francisco Bay on what is now the Marina District.
Paul Elder & Company had a booth at the PPIE, and published a number of books on or about the Fair. Over the coming weeks, we will be highlighting each of those titles. Watch this space!
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a big deal for Paul Elder & Company. He published eleven books on or about the fair, and he also had a handsome bookstore booth inside the Palace of Liberal Arts. Please follow the above link for photographs and other details!
Additionally, Elder published two books for the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, which opened just a few weeks after the PPIE and stayed open a year longer:
12. The Architecture and Gardens of the San Diego Exposition
271. The San Diego Garden Fair
Cover of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”
This week’s spotlight, Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast, makes a fine bookend to last week’s A Yosemite Flora. They are the only two pure science books that Paul Elder published, but what wonderful science books they are.
One of Elder’s eleven books on or about the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Nature and Science is a comprehensive natural history of the West Coast, primarily California, with additional articles in the field of literature, fine arts, law, and travel. The list of contributors includes botanist Harvey Monroe Hall (author of A Yosemite Flora), architect John Galen Howard, engineer Joseph LeConte, and astronomer A. O. Leuschner.
Frontispiece and title page of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”
The editor-in-chief was Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939), director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, and a famous name to any zoology student at the University, including yours truly. Grinnell was the inventor of the “Grinnell System,” a method of meticulous note-taking that is still taught to every UC Berkeley zoology student to this day. Notes must be taken in the field from direct observation, to be followed by a detailed journal entry transcribed from the field notes. Any specimens must include the precise date, location, weather, and if possible, photographs. The method even specifies the quality of notebook (durable), paper (high) and ink (very black, and waterproof). Grinnell’s goal was that the notes could be readable 200 years into the future.
Joseph Grinnell in 1904.Fold out map of San Francisco, with the PPIE fairgrounds prominently marked at top middle.
Included in the book are many fold out street maps of the major coastal cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, and one large coated map of the California “life zones”.
Pages 30-31 of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”Large fold out map of California “life zones,” which today we would call “biomes” or “ecosystems”
Paul Elder published this beautiful booklet during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It’s a real gem, with striking full-color drawings by Audley B. Wells and a matching envelope.
Perhaps only after admiring the booklet do we notice the poem it contains, California, by Fred Emerson Brooks (1850-1923). Though Brooks and his poetry have been forgotten, he was very popular a century ago as a writer and speaker. Modesty, it would seem, was not one of Brooks’s character flaws. Billed in a promotional flyer as “The Man Who Never Disappoints, Always Smiling, Always There,” his Chicago publisher gushes:
Fred Emerson Brooks is one of the great men in the lyceum world … Phenomenal health, a clean life and a sunny nature give him a remarkable record. Brooks has a marvelous breadth of thought and expression—there is no passion or feeling he does not portray. He is a gifted orator with a voice ranging from that of thunder to the softness of a summer zephyr.
The flyer also includes endorsements from Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt (“I’ve heard Brooks, and he’s bully!”) and Taft.
California, A PoemCalifornia, page 3California, page 5California, page 7California, page 9California, page 11California, page 13California, page 15matching envelope to "California"
