The “Other” San Francisco - San Francisco: Spend Less See More - page 145

Leafing Through History
San Francisco is a top-notch place to delve into a variety of topics impor-
tant to the history of the United States. There are literally dozens of
research libraries that, although by reservation, welcome visitors from all
walks of life to plumb old papers, magazines, and other artifacts from the
past. These unsung resources are broken down by subject matter; depend-
ing on what excites you, you'd be unlikely to go to more than one or two,
but here are some of the options.
One of the world's great research oddities, Prelinger Library (301 8th St.,
Room 215, at Folsom; no phone; [e-mail]) is stuffed from
floor to ceiling, and often in the middle of the aisles, with what the propri-
etors call “ephemera”—stuff that is either in the public domain or whose
copyrights have expired but has some cultural value. A visit here is always
surprising—you never know what you're going to stumble across in the
stacks. These orphans of the research world include Robert Merry's Museum, a
children's omnibus magazine from the Civil War era; the 1978 survey of 42nd
Street that kicked off the Times Square revitalization; and a 1958 carnival of
marketing stereotypes known as Wolff's What Makes Women Buy. The gray
archive boxes are, for me, where it's at, since they contain a mixed bag of
(often totally unrelated) items that haven't been bound in book form.
As its organizers (if that's the term) phrase it, “The freedom to browse
serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many research libraries are
economizing on space and converting print collections to microfilm and
digital formats, it's becoming harder to wander and let the shelves them-
selves suggest new directions and ideas.” Opening hours vary and you
should e-mail ahead, but it's generally open Wednesdays from 1 to 8pm.
For those interested in the high seas, the J. Porter Shaw Maritime
Library (Building E, Fort Mason; % 415/561-7080; Mon-Fri and 1st Sat
of each month) is a repository for timetables, scrapbooks, sailor's crafts,
machinery, and other items that tell the rich story of West Coast maritime
history.
was tapped to create it. The result is a complicated, whimsical flowchart of boxes
and seemingly simple images that ingeniously tell a tale of the evolution of human
communication. It's the kind of work that takes a while to fully decipher, and
unfortunately, to do that properly in this case, you'll be standing in moving traf-
fic on Valencia. Better to take some digital photos of it and inspect it safely later.
HOW LOCALS WORSHIP
People in other parts of America, particularly souls who have never been to San
Francisco, like to mock the city as a bastion of godlessness. In fact, nothing could
be farther from the truth. In part because of a long working-class tradition, San
Francisco is an extremely churchy town; in particular, its Catholic and Episcopalian