Californiana — the exploration, settlement, and literature of the Golden State.
A California bookseller collects California naturally, and Randall House did so with a specialist's depth. Californiana is a field of remarkable variety, running from the earliest Spanish accounts of the coast, through the explosive years of the Gold Rush, to the writers who made the state a subject of American literature. Housed for decades on the central coast, the firm was ideally placed to gather it.
Exploration and the Missions
The printed history of California begins with exploration: the voyages along the Pacific coast, the overland expeditions, and the founding of the mission chain. Early accounts — many first published in Spanish or in the reports of government surveys — are the foundation documents of the field, prized for their maps as much as their text. The Bancroft Library at Berkeley remains the great institutional collection against which private holdings are measured.
The Gold Rush
No event produced more collectible print than the Gold Rush of 1849. The guidebooks that lured the argonauts west, the emigrant narratives, the mining-camp imprints, and the eyewitness letters home together document one of the great migrations in American history. Gold Rush material is eagerly collected and endlessly various — a field where a modest budget and a sharp eye can still build a meaningful collection.
The Literature of the State
California made writers as surely as it made fortunes. Bret Harte and Mark Twain found their first national audiences in its mining camps and newspapers; Jack London carried the state's restless energy into the twentieth century; and the fine printers of San Francisco, above all the Grabhorn Press, gave California books a physical beauty to match their subject. Together they form a distinctly Western strand of American letters.
Building a California Collection
The field rewards focus. A collector might pursue a single county, the imprints of one frontier press, the literature of the missions, or the ephemera of the Gold Rush. Whatever the theme, the standard references — Cowan's Bibliography of the History of California chief among them — provide the map. For the institutional context, the California Historical Society is an indispensable resource.