“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

So wrote Joan Didion.

And in keeping with her observation, this catalogue attempts, however loosely and haphazardly, to offer a small collection of the various ways in which a place can be defined: personally, culturally, historically, geographically. So, within you’ll find not only the diaries and correspondence of everyday people trying to make sense of their surroundings ... in war, during the American western expansion, or even just a youthful jaunt through Europe, but also the material realities of the mundane of everyday commerce, everyday work, everyday existence.

For such within is the stuff of place in everyday life.  Enjoy.

A catalogue is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get. That’s especially true of this catalogue. Basketball has its March Madness; Tavistock has its March Miscellany.  Sure, you can probably count on some Dickens, maybe a nursing item or two. But you’ll also encounter new and unexpected treats, not found in any other box of chocolates. Enjoy!

History of human society is primarily composed of actions & behavior by people, often acting in concert, many times not.  And most of what we today know about human history comes from those individuals who record it as it happens, whether intentionally through such means as a diary, or indirectly, such as later inferences made from printed material & other remnants of the era being studied.  A oft expressed lament of modern historical scholars is the lack of such documentation from the ‘comman man’, especially in the early modern period.  Such, hopefully, will not be the concern of scholars centuries hence, as more folk of the common variety, during the last two centuries, did keep records…  print, visual & written.  Herein, you will find such material.  Records documenting ‘normal' people, going about ‘normal' activities, but please do not confuse ‘normal' with uninteresting.  Item 10 are the comprehensive diaries of a late 19th C. man involved in, amongst many other activities, silver mining in Colorado; no. 7 the archive of a significant player in World War II; you’ll find many wonderful photograph albums that record & document everything from boat building, to telephone infastructure, to a California rodeo. So here we offer history.  Enjoy.