Very Rare and Important Early San Francisco Directory
With a Fine Lithograph Map of San Francisco and a View of the City
The great historian of the West, Hubert Howe Bancroft, called Parker's Directory of San Francisco, "the first really excellent directory" of the city. It is a very rare and maintains a high stature among important San Francisco books issued during the Gold Rush.
This fascinating item of Western Americana stands as a key primary source on the commercial affairs of the city and the professional lives of its citizens at the height of the Gold Rush. It features a highly detailed map of the city, a lithographed city view, almost 80 pages listing the names, addresses and occupations of residents involved in professions or trades, a list of office holders, an almanac for the year 1852-3, as well as dozens of advertisements for a variety of items such as "gold dust" and "whale oil."
While not the earliest city directory of San Francisco, that distinction belonging to Charles Kimball's The San Francisco City Directory...September 1, 1850 (although two strictly business directories preceded it), Parker's directory is remarkable for reflecting the explosion of growth that marked the city due to the Gold Rush. It is also the first San Francisco directory to contain a map of the city.
As mentioned above, Bancroft praised this directory as source for Gold Rush San Francisco:
The first really excellent directory was issued in December 1852 by J. M. Parker. It [lists] about 9000 names, prefaced by an historic sketch and admirable plan of the city, and followed by a valuable appendix of general information and statistics - Bancroft.
The lengthy directory listing the names, addresses and professions of thousands of the city's residents is today considered to be an extremely important primary source for the history of San Francisco during the Gold Rush. In 1852, San Francisco had a population of over 36,000, which had exploded upwards from 850 residents in 1848. The transient nature of the population continuously saw many new arrivals and departures, often with little or no official record. This directory listing is thus a vital means of tracking who was resident in the city in 1852, what activities they were engaged in.
...the directory's historical sketch provides an excellent overview of the impact of the Gold Rush. Parker described the reaction of newspapers to the announcement, the stunning rise in prices for goods and land, the schedules for passenger and mail arrival, the winter of '49, the development of civic institutions, and other topics such as fires, gambling and saloons, new buildings, and street layout - Kurutz.
Detailed Lithograph Map of San Francisco
A highlight of the directory is the very fine double-sheet Map of San Francisco, compiled from latest Surveys and containing all the late extensions and Division of Wards, Expressly for Parker's City Directory. While this edition was made especially for the directory, it is in fact a modified version of Britton & Rey's 1852 city map, which is, in turn, is based of surveys conducted by Alexander Zakreski. It shows the massive land reclamation projects that were to transform the city. The crescent of land that makes up downtown San Francisco at the foot of Market Street had been recently filled in. The projects to expand the shorelines South of Market and in North Beach were still in the planning stage. While the familiar grid system of streets of the downtown had already taken shape, the urban area really only extended inland as far as Larkin Street, while the area South of Market was sparsely developed. Various quays and wharfs project from the shoreline of the downtown, handling the busy steamer traffic as it arrived and departed from the Gold Country.
The directory also includes the attractive View of San Francisco, from the Bay, printed on yellow paper, by the prominent stationer and publisher Josiah J. Le Count.
The erratic nature of the directory's pagination, with blocks of text sometimes misplaced against their numerical order, is common to surviving examples of the work. The present example has a fairly logical order, with the collation mostly following that called for in bibliographies. While Quebedeaux calls for 48 pages of ads in the final section of pages, the present example has 36 pages. The first and last pages of advertisements are grafted onto the covers, whereas some other examples have a separate cover page, and often fewer advertisements. The haphazard nature of the collations is due to the nature of the production of such a work - quickly printed, bound and sold.
Rarity
Parker's directory is very rare, and it was notably lacking from Howell's famous Catalogue 50 (1979) which including most of the early California directories. W can find no examples in dealer's catalogs and only a couple of examples offered at auction in the last 25 years.