San Francisco’s most overdue library book finally made its way home. Some 120 years ago, one patron borrowed Bret Harte’s Echoes of the Foot-Hills from the Mechanics’ Institute downtown. The book did not make it back to library shelves before the 1906 earthquake and fire consumed the Institute. As such, it was believed Hart’s collection of poetry inspired by the Bay Area’s many arresting vistas went up in smoke. Kissed by the flames of the city’s greatest disaster, this book predates the internet, the atom bomb, penicillin. Now, Echoes of the Foot-Hills stands proudly on display in the Institute’s current library, echo of an era long-gone.
A glowing skylight crowns the dizzying spiral staircase at the Mechanics’ Institute in downtown San Francisco. Creative commons.
Overdue fine waived for decedent borrower; heir breaks curse, spirit free to cross over
Perhaps they kept it intentionally, or like myself with Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, kept meaning to return it. I won’t pretend with nostalgia for the past that people in the early 20th century behaved any more responsibly. One’s tendency to avoid downtown must be at least that old. But the 1906 earthquake and fire left one patron no library to return Echoes of the Foot-Hills to. In any case, the book was presumed destroyed, along with the rest of downtown.
By 1910, a new Mechanics’ Institute stood in place of the former, serving San Francisco like they have since 1854. What began as a vocational school where old Gold Rushers could acquire new trades expanded into a patent workshop and a chess tournament hall, too. In time the Institute’s library re-accumulated a world-class collection of mechanical sciences and general interest that continues to operate today.
The Mechanics’ Institute has operated, with brief exception for disaster, at this spot on Post Street since the late 19th century. Creative commons.
Harte’s Echoes was already 28 years old when the earthquake and fire claimed its shelfmates. It reflects colonial San Francisco c. early nineteenth century. “Looking seaward, o’er the sand-hills stands the fortress old and quaint, by the San Francisco friars lifted to their patron saint,” is the quote SFGate ran with. The Jesuit fathers of our city controlled its narrative for decades; does it critique or accuse anything to write this the way Harte did? Are all of his poems read in religious praise, or is one of them hiding something?
I swear analyzing poems is fun once you get the hang of it
On sand dunes and landfill, slowly, achingly, San Francisco rebuilt. In the meantime, Bret Harte’s Echoes of the Foot-Hills watched quietly while the world changed drastically around it. Published 1875, Harte’s poems are not just postcards of colonial San Francisco. Some appear to yearn for an era that, by the time this book went to print, was already long-gone. What further implications about the culture(s) that framed these images can we derive from those sooty pages?
You may find me at the Mechanics’ Institute carefully turning the pages (or even likelier, reading a digitization) for more. Membership doesn’t sound like a bad deal at all, and comes with perks. Most immediate to me is finding an oasis of calm in the turbulence of downtown San Francisco. Annual individual memberships are a mere $150 ($80 for students ages 35 and under; $225 for households).
