In fact, I’d guess that in this age of digital imaging and mapping, San Francisco has become the world’s most thoroughly documented city. I’m reminded of The Illustrated Directory: Vol. 1, San Francisco, an 1894 guidebook shown to me recently by David Rumsey, a private collector of historical maps. This beautiful and extremely rare volume, full of artists’ engravings of each block of San Francisco’s business district, was unique for its time — and about 110 years ahead of A9 and Google. Without it, historians would know much less about the visual appearance of late-nineteenth-century San Francisco, much of which was destroyed in the catastrophic earthquake and fire of 1906. (To see the entire book, go to www.davidrumsey.com, open the “Insight Browser,” and do a search using the terms “illustrated San Francisco.”)
