Literary Industries: Chasing a Vanishing West

Hubert Howe Bancroft

dic 2013 · Heyday.ORIM

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An autobiography of the bookseller, library collector, man of letters, and historian of the American West edited by his great-great granddaughter.

A bookseller in San Francisco during the gold rush, Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918) rose to become the man who would define the early history of California and the West. Creating what he called a “history factory,” he assembled a vast library of over sixty thousand books, maps, letters, and documents; hired scribes to copy material in private hands; employed interviewers to capture the memories of early Spanish and Mexican settlers; and published multiple volumes sold throughout the country by his subscription agents. In 1890 he published an eight-hundred-page autobiography, aptly entitled Literary Industries. Literary Industries sparkles with the exuberance of nineteenth-century California and introduces us to a man of great complexity and wit. Edited for the modern reader and yet relating the history of the West as it was taking place—and as it was being recorded—Kim Bancroft’s edition of Literary Industries is a joy to read.
 

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Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. She earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at various high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. Kim has edited several books, including Ariel: A Memoir by Ariel Parkinson; The Morning the Sun Went Down by Darryl Wilson; and Ruth's Journey: A Survivor's Memoir, by Ruth Glasberg Gold. She lives in Willits, California, in a redwood forest and enjoys the nouveau-Thoreau challenges and opportunities of life in a small cabin with a satellite dish on top. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Hubert Howe Bancroft.