Literary Industries: Chasing a Vanishing West

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 ha...