“Twelve Stories of Solid Comfort”

Advertising brochure for Hotel Savoy, Seattle, Washington (circa 1908)

I’m not much of a fan of puns, but I do enjoy some forms of wordplay.  Recently I was trying to supply a date for yet another lovely piece of ephemera I had to catalog.  The item in question (back cover panel pictured above) was an advertising brochure for Seattle’s Hotel Savoy, which boasted of that lodging as being the perfect place to stay while taking in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (remember that?).  Clearly, the brochure must have been distributed some time around 1909, although the language of the announcement, which still made the AYPE seem a future prospect, made a slightly earlier date of “publication” a possibility.  I decided to double check quickly to see if the Hotel Savoy predated the fair.  I soon came across a handy publication entitled, The Heritage of Seattle Hotels, which included the following information:

Nothing approached the Rainier-Grand’s bon vivant popularity until THE SAVOY HOTEL opened in 1906.  Not pretentious by any means, advertised as “12 stories of solid comfort,” there happened to be elaborate French-period accommodations on the top floor…jokingly dubbed, by men-about-town, as “the vice-Presidential Suite.

For some reason, that passage immediately made me think of the television series, Mad Men.  Were those bon vivants who patronized the Savoy the “mad men” of their day?  Then I realized that one of the running jokes from the show’s season premiere had been the numerous references to “floors” made throughout the episode, culminating in Don Draper’s proposed slogan for a swimsuit ad campaign: “So well built, we can’t show you the second floor.”  Scary coincidence?  Even more strange was that the fictional client in the show was real life Northwest company, Jantzen (currently celebrating a centenary).

Floors?  Stories?  Get it?

The date I decided to use for the brochure in the catalog record was 1908 — as good as truth or fiction.  I’ll leave you all to decode the deeper meanings of Mad Men for yourselves.

Image credit: Washington State Historical Society Digital Collections Accession ID No. 2004.24.1

Name Those Men!

James E. Bradford with two unidentified men

With our own Flickr Commons site still in the offing, what better way to while away a Friday afternoon than to try to identify who is in this photograph and what are they doing?

Since another election day is just around the corner (remember to vote!), here is one of the eight loose photographs we discovered while cataloging the James E. Bradford scrapbooks last fall.  If you compare the image from his election flier, you will see that one of these men is an older version of Bradford (sorry for the low resolution scans).  The rest is up to you!

Last Minute Gift Ideas, Circa 1908?

Lowman & Hanford Company booksellers store interior, circa 1908

Hour 2 on the Service Desk and only a few creatures are stirring.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Image credit: Order no. SEA1809, Seattle Photograph Collection.

Election Day

Robert Bridges scrapbooks volume three

Just a brief reminder to get your ballot in and a preview of sorts of coming attractions.

By coincidence (or is it?) some recently cataloged scrapbooks from the Pacific Northwest Collection have provided a window into the frequently rough and tumble world of early twentieth century Seattle politics.

Stay tuned for some of these stories, the possible appearance of yet another new blogger, as well as the return of a familiar voice.

Interim Hours

Apologies.  Amidst all the hubbub and tears over the past week, we completely neglected to announce that the Special Collections Division will be operating on a reduced public service schedule during the long interim.  The reading room will be open Monday-Friday, from 1:00-4:45 pm through September 29, 2009.  More details about hours are available on the UW Libraries Web site.

Hop Culture By Ezra Meeker (1883)

One of the things that I miss about living in the Yakima Valley is the smell of hops. I grew up in an agricultural area in California; for me, there is nothing as wonderful as being out in a grove of fruit trees or a crop field. So if you haven’t ever smelled hops, visit a brewery or go explore Toppenish. If you drive out into the hop-vine fields, be sure to roll your windows up to keep the dust out, but do stop, get out, and indulge in the fragrance.

Here is an excerpt from Hop Culture by Ezra Meeker (1830-1928) about growing hops in Puyallup:

“If ever there was a cause for anxiety the hop-growers of Washington Territory have it when harvest time approaches. Most of the picking is done by Indians, many of whom come long distances, some of them three hundred miles in their canoes, bringing with them their dogs and their cats, their chickens and thumpery as through they had come to ‘stay all summer.’ The question of questions with the hop-growers, will enough come? if [sic]so, will they arrive in time? “

Come see the book for yourself. It has beautiful illustrations and diagrams.

http://catalog.lib.washington.edu/record=b1010559~S6

Can Social Networking Save an Archives?

The sad news of the Oregon Historical Society’s Research Library has been generating much buzz in the blogosphere (archives and otherwise) — for a representative example, go here.  Must we really join Facebook now to show our support?

It will be interesting to see if this kind of social pressure is effective.

Archives Porn?

Gaylord Brothers Archival 2009 catalog

I was finding myself mesmerized by the cover of the 2009 Gaylord Archival catalog earlier this morning (the digital thumbnail does not do it justice).

If  “food porn” can have its own Flickr group, etc., etc., why not archives?

That picture just makes me want to go out and encapsulate something.

Live Blogging at the Service Desk!

Not a good idea.

Scrapbook Project to Begin

We are about to embark on the unknown.  Next week we will launch a project to begin to create catalog records for the Pacific Northwest Collection’s scrapbook collection.  The momentum for this project really began when local hero, Mark Carlson, was able to convert the data from the html table listing the (mainly uncataloged) scrapbooks on the current Special Collections Web site into MARC format.

Next week, new iSchool volunteer for Special Collections, Mahrya Carncross, will begin to take these very basic (and sometimes problematic records) and start the painstaking (but fun?) process of turning all of them (approximately 170) into acceptable minimal level records to be loaded into WorldCat.  As time allows, we hope that she also will be able to fully catalog selected scrapbooks as well.  (I’ll try to explain the distinction some other time to all of you non-catalogers out there).  Which means you shouldn’t be running into stuff like this:

040  WAU ǂc WAU
090  ǂb
049  WAUW
1102 Salmon
24510Salmon scrapbook, ǂf 1914.
300  1 ǂf volume
5202 Clippings and menus about salmon.
506  Open to all users.
540  Some restrictions may exist on duplication, quotation, or publication. Contact the repository for details.
655 0Scrapbooks.
9451 ǂl scsbf ǂt 7 ǂs – ǂy In process record; contact repository for up-to-date information

I know I’m intrigued!  We hope to be able to share some of our sure-to-be-exciting discoveries in the scrapbook collection in the coming months.

P.S. The image above does not come from the Pacific Northwest Collection (and it could depict an Atlantic salmon for all I know).  Just a shout out to our friends back East. It is a digital image of a cigarette card in the George Arents Collection, New York Public Library from the always useful and easy-to-search NYPL Digital Gallery.  Full info here.

Image credit: The Salmon, Arents cigarette cards 869, NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID 1570301