Paul Elder & Company

“Starr King” was a famous name when Paul Elder published this volume in 1917. Today, one might say he was one of the most important Californians you’ve never heard of.

Thomas Starr King (1824-1864) was a Unitarian minister who became very influential in California politics. He was born in New York, and despite being forced to leave school to support his family, studied on his own and became a minister at the age of 20. In 1849 he became pastor of the Hollis Street Church in Boston and soon became one of the most famous ministers in the country. In 1860 he agreed to come to San Francisco and lead the First Unitarian Church. He was a passionate orator on behalf of the Union during the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln famously credited Starr King with preventing California from becoming a separate republic (the California state flag, however, still retains the phrase “California Republic” under the grizzly bear). He often campaigned to raise money for the United States Sanitary Commission (a predecessor to the American Red Cross); the travel took a toll on his health and he died in 1864 of diphtheria, just 39 years old.

In 1913, Starr King’s fame was such that the California legislature enshrined him as one of California’s two honorees, along with Father Junípero Serra, in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. In 2006, however, the California legislature voted to replace Starr King’s statue with one of Ronald Reagan. State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, displaying remarkable self-irony, said “To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was, and I think there’s probably a lot of Californians like me.” He also pointed out that Starr King wasn’t a native Californian, somehow forgetting that Reagan was born in Illinois and Serra in Mallorca, Spain. Starr King’s statue was removed in 2009 and now resides in the gardens of the state capitol in Sacramento.

Two streets in San Francisco are named after him: Starr King St., adjoining his Unitarian Church on Franklin St (the current building was built in 1889, long after his death); and King St., which borders Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball club.

I have been unable to find much information about author and historian William Day Simonds (1855-1920).

In 1979, Peregrine Smith republished Charles Keeler’s most famous work, The Simple Home. The edition included a new introduction by Dimitri Shipounoff. This brilliant piece of writing by Shipounoff, a Berkeley native who now lives in France, is nearly as long as Keeler’s own text. Here is Shipounoff’s opening paragraph:

The architectural development of the unique San Francisco Bay Region style left perhaps its most important literary legacy in Charles Keeler’s little book “The Simple Home.” This book, dedicated to the architect Bernard Maybeck, was largely a polemic against the architectural shams and gingerbread of the Victorian age, and apaean to “a simpler, a truer, a more vital art expression” then taking place in California. Charles Keeler, a Berkeley poet, naturalist, and self-appointed policeman of the arts wrote on architecure from the standpoint of a layman. As Maybeck’s first private commission in 1895, Keeler’s house at Highland Place helped set an idealogical precedent for a new kind of architecture in north Berkeley. Keeler’ subscription to this idealogy was partly a product of his experience of living in such a home. In initiating the formation of the Hillside Club, he urged his future neighbors to build houses in a style that would be compatible with his own. The Simple Home was written in 1904, during his presidency of the Hillside Club. As President from 1903-05, he extended the organization’s purview to include the greater Berkeley hills, in an effort to protect them from shoddy housing development. Bernard Maybeck became the club’s idol, Charles Keeler its high priest, and The Simple Home naturally became its bible.

The Simple Home is also the rarest book of significance that Paul Elder & Company ever published. Copies of the original edition are quite scarce and command high prices; I recently saw a copy priced at $600. In contrast, the Peregrine Smith edition (also out of print) can be found with a little patience, usually priced at $30-50.

Curiously, The Simple Home does not exhibit the usual traits of a book that is held in such high regard by the Arts & Crafts movement. Instead of handmade paper, the book contains coated stock. Instead of letterpress printing, the pages are offset. This may have been done in order to display the many architectural photographs in higher quality (later Elder publications would generally have photographs tipped-in). The cover is quite plain, with only a paper sticker over the cloth.