Literary Industries: Chasing a Vanishing West

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.