Photograph of Carol Field by Russell Yip

BOOKS | Carol Field

Now that the new edition of my book The Italian Baker has been published, I have been reliving the adventure of working with bakers all over Italy. It started in San Francisco in 1981 when Il Fornaio, then a bakery featuring Italian breads and sweets, opened at the corner of Steiner and Union Streets. I couldn’t believe my good fortune: Italy had come to my neighborhood.

I was there almost every day, learning from bakers from Rome, Florence, Ferrara and elsewhere. They were wrestling with the problem of adapting American ingredients to their Italian recipes and I listened and was intrigued. I wrote an article for Attenzione, a magazine for lovers of Italy that, alas, no longer exists. It got such a strong response that it began to seem a logical next step to write a book.

When my family lived in Italy in the ’70s, our rental house in Liguria was no more than 30 miles from good friends who lived in Tuscany, but it could have been 200 for all the differences in the food and bread. In Liguria, we ate focaccia as our daily bread; in Tuscany, it was saltless loaves. In Liguria we ate pesto on pasta; in Tuscany pasta turned up rarely so we ate hearty soups instead. Easter in Liguria was celebrated with torta pasqualina, 33 phyllo-thin layers of dough enclosing a chard and egg filling. In Tuscany Easter week brought pan di ramerino, rosemary and raisin buns that reminded me of hot cross buns with an apricot glaze.

On the 12 or 13 trips to Italy it took to write The Italian Baker, I realized that I had plunged into an unknown world. With good introductions, there I was, an American woman turning up in Italian bakeries at 10 or 11 at night wanting to learn how bakers made the iconic breads of their cities and regions and countryside. Night after night, city after city, trip after trip, I was determined to get it down.

There were no books on the subject. Bread making is an art handed down from father to son, so I ended up relying on the equivalent of oral history, with the additional challenge of learning a whole new vocabulary. I watched, wrote copious notes, asked question after question, saw massive amounts of flour whirl in a machine with water and yeast and salt. I wrote down numbers. I laid breads on a table, set a tape measure in front of them, took their pictures, asked about ovens and temperatures and wondered how their big deck ovens would translate at home.

Back home on Washington Street, I tried to recreate the miracles of these breads and sweets, taking a formula for 20 kilos of flour and working to reduce it to two or three loaves. Motes of flour swirled in the kitchen air. I could make a starter, which Italians call a biga, with flour and water and a small amount of yeast, and it bubbled energetically in the space of hours. I made hundreds of loaves, trying out variations in proportions and types of flour. A typical day found me making several kinds of bread, documenting each stage and each variation and finally sitting down around 6 p.m., glassy eyed.

Every visit to a different region of Italy taught me more. I learned that authentic bread sticks were easy to shape, that durum flour made fantastic bread in Puglia and Sicily and that the cracker-thin crusts of Roman pizza were very different than the Neapolitan version.

I came back to San Francisco having tasted breads made for Easter in various regions. In Friuli it was a Gubana, a brioche-like bread with raisins and nuts moistened with five different liqueurs. In Naples, I ate Casatiello — a spicy cheese bread flecked with chunks of salami and freshly ground pepper. In Umbria, I tried an intense cheese-flavored bread baked in terra cotta flowerpots.

And always there was the rhythm, from Washington Street to Italy and then back again, each trip full of discoveries to reproduce so that Americans could bake the iconic tastes of Italy. Friends knew to come by on baking days. Our next-door neighbors looked out the window and arrived in their pajamas.

Since all those trips and the first edition of The Italian Baker, which was published in 1985, more tastes of Italy have come to the neighborhood. Pizzeria Delfina makes pizza for ever-expanding crowds. SPQR makes outstanding “modern Italian” food and serves a gorgeous array of Italian wines. Mollie Stone’s sells cheeses imported from Italy and blood orange juice from Sicily.

It’s wonderful to relive an experience after so many years. Once again I can say: Italy has come to my neighborhood.

Read more: “Food of the poor is no longer for the poor”

Photograph of Julian Guthrie on Fillmore Street by Chris Hardy

FIRST PERSON | Julian Guthrie

Having lived in San Francisco for nearly 20 years and worked as a reporter first for the Examiner and now for the Chronicle, I have come to see the different ways neighborhoods in the city are defined. For many, the center of a neighborhood is a coffee house, or a park, or a commercial strip to stroll. For me, it’s all those things.

The area around Fillmore Street has long been my home. I jog the steps of Alta Plaza and spend countless hours at the playground with my son. We love the yogurt at Fraiche, the pastries at the Boulangerie and the Fillmore Bakeshop — and we adored its predecessor, Patisserie Delanghe. We’re regulars at Delfina and Dino’s and Florio and SPQR.

This neighborhood works, with its mix of young and old and in between, its families and dogs, its parks and shops. And while countless amazing stores and restaurants have come and gone (Fillamento, the Brown Bag and Bittersweet, to name a few), the relaxed character of the neighborhood remains the same. It’s what drew me here, and what keeps me here.

In recent years, I’ve learned of yet another way people define their neighborhoods: by a house of worship. My new book, The Grace of Everyday Saints — published August 18 — is about a group of people who found a strong sense of community through their spiritual home, St. Brigid, the muscular stone church at the corner of Broadway and Van Ness Avenue.

The parish, established in 1863, has always drawn people from Russian Hill, Nob Hill, the Marina and Pacific Heights. The Catholics of St. Brigid marked certain indelible moments of their lives there: baptisms, confirmations, confessions, weddings and funerals. They found comfort in the routine of sitting in those solid oak pews for Sunday Mass. Many told me they had moved into the neighborhood because of St. Brigid. Some had come from across the globe — from Mexico, Burma, the Philippines, Ireland, Italy — and settled into this corner of San Francisco, attaching themselves to the neighborhood because of the church.

St. Brigid Church at Broadway and Van Ness Avenue

Then, in late 1993, the San Francisco Archdiocese made an announcement that brought shock and sadness: St. Brigid, along with Sacred Heart on Fillmore and a dozen other Catholic churches across San Francisco, would close. There were fewer Catholics in the city. Fewer men were entering the priesthood. Buildings damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake needed costly repairs.

St. Brigid parishioners reacted with anger, grief and — ultimately — resistance. The Grace of Everyday Saints, which began as a series of stories I wrote for the Chronicle, is about their struggle. I’ve spent nearly six years with this band from St. Brigid, struck by their devotion to this place they called home.

I also fell for the people — some great San Franciscans who embody the best of the city. There’s Robert Bryan, an appellate attorney who lives with his wife, Nicole, near the church in Pacific Heights. Bryan was just becoming a Catholic, but vowed to fight for the church as tenaciously as he would for a client on death row. There’s Father Cyril O’Sullivan, a young anti-establishment priest from Ireland who had to decide whether to follow the will of his superiors or the wish of his people. And there’s Joe Dignan, a reluctant Catholic who found answers to his inner turmoil at the same time he became a leader of the St. Brigid pack.

There are many other great characters: Carmen Esteva, a Filipina who moved a half-block from St. Brigid so she could attend Mass daily, believing it was the only way to save her soul. There is a humble housepainter, David Hansell, who took it upon himself to care for the church for years after it was closed, repairing the doors, removing graffiti, plucking weeds from its surroundings, treating it as a comatose loved one who would eventually awake. There is Siu-Mei Wong, who converted to Catholicism from Buddhism and forged a family from strangers.

And there is an image that still haunts: a solitary candle burning on the front steps of St. Brigid that its parishioners managed to keep aflame for 10 years as they took the battle from their sunlit sanctuary all the way to the steps of the Vatican in Rome. While these parishioners without a parish didn’t get everything they set out for, they found faith, joy and family redefined — and won unimagined victories along the way.

The altar at St. Brigid Church, which served the neighborhood for more than a century.

Its remodeling completed on time and within budget, the historic home of the Presidio Branch library at 3150 Sacramento Street reopened on March 26. The renovation included restoration of the exterior and interior and refurbishing of the original wood shelving. An interactive learning area for children and a teen area were added, along with 16 public computers and WiFi access.

The library has been serving the neighborhood since 1898. Its landmark home, completed in 1921, was funded by Andrew Carnegie.

Photograph of Browser Books by Kathi O'Leary

BOOKS | Ken Samuels

A customer walks into Browser Books on Fillmore and approaches the counter with a sly smile on his face. “Hey,” he says, “are you guys happy that Borders is closing in Union Square?”

“I’m not happy for the people who lost their jobs,” I reply, “but it doesn’t surprise me.”

I tell him I’ve been following the stories of Borders’ financial troubles in the newspapers and in Publishers Weekly. Borders was hit hard by the rise of online bookselling and was slow to respond to the challenge. In addition, a megastore in a megaspace like Union Square has a huge overhead that must be crippling in these tough times.

“I understand that,” he says, “but does it help you?”

That’s an interesting question. It gets to the heart of the challenge that an independent neighborhood bookstore such as Browser faces these days. In our case, the Union Square Borders never had a significant negative impact on us. The residents of our neighborhood — as in most of San Francisco — have been loyal to their local bookshop. We know our customers by name. We know what they might like to read. I’ve been having ongoing conversations with them for a decade or more. These sorts of relationships have sustained us through good times and bad and are the bedrock of any longtime neighborhood business.

But is that enough to keep us going these days? Visiting customers from all over the country have told me how happy they are to be in our store because their neighborhood bookshops are all gone. While that is both sad and gratifying to hear, we face the same threats that all bookstores, large and small, face: online bookselling, the rise of e-books and of course the rough economy of the last few years.

Without question, Browser Books and other neighborhood stores must respond to the latest trends and mediums of acquiring books. But the core of our business remains the personal connection we make with readers.

My colleagues and I love books. We love to read. We are interested in topics that range from Buddhism to cooking to the literature of the Lost Generation to tigers and beyond. Lately I’ve been reading Chekhov’s short stories and the brilliant, funny novels of Charles Portis. But I also love to talk about the latest baseball books, crime fiction, my favorite book on southern soul (Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick) and my favorite children’s book (Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson).

Come on in. Let’s talk books.

Ken Samuels has worked at Browser Books at 2195 Fillmore since 1996.

A fter retiring as a high school English teacher, Eleanor Burke decided she needed a project to keep busy — and an excuse to explore the city she’d called home all her life.

A few years earlier she had sketched architectural highlights of Russian Hill and published a small guide to the neighborhood. So she decided to expand her horizons and take on the rest of the city. After all, she’d lived in seven of its neighborhoods and knew most of the rest.

Or so she thought.

“I learned how much I didn’t know,” she says now, awaiting the arrival from the printer of Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods, her new book, which she says offers, “a visual journey through the well-known and not-so-well-known areas of the city.”

When Burke started, friends worried for her safety and warned her: Don’t go to Bayview. Don’t go to Visitacion Valley. “That just isn’t true,” she says. “People are quite friendly to a little lady on her scooter with a camera.”

Burke has stories to tell about every corner of the city — and hundreds of drawings of the quirks and oddities and beauties that caught her eye in various neighborhoods. “They all have their own flavor,” she says. “And it is flavor. Go down Third Street and you smell fried chicken. On Potrero, it’s beer.”

Burke grew up on Jackson Street in Presidio Heights. “Out of my bedroom window I saw the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge,” she says. She and her friends played together down the hill at the Julius Kahn Playground with their parents’ encouragement. “Parents worry more now,” she says. And yet she pronounces a definitive judgment about the changes that have come to the city during her lifetime: “Things have gotten better — across the board.” She hopes her book will “help people get out of their comfort zone.”

Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods will soon be available for $25 at Browser Books on Fillmore, Books Inc. in Laurel Village and the Warming Hut at Crissy Field, plus other independent bookstores around the city.

“I want it to be in the neighborhoods,” Burke says, “especially the offbeat neighborhoods.”

She knows where they are.

From Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods by Eleanor Burke

Photograph of Browser Books by Kathi O'Leary

FIRST PERSON | Ken Samuels

The other day, while selling some books to a couple of young men, I realized I’d known them since they were little kids pleading with their mothers to buy them Berenstain Bears books.

That sums up my decade and a half at Browser Books on Fillmore and Sacramento selling books to the families of this neighborhood. I get to know them as they return again and again. Some kids are shy, nudging their parents to the counter to ask a question, while others march up and confidently fire away with their requests. Hands down, these are the most rewarding moments of my workday.

I never forget how booksellers shared their enthusiasm for literature with me when I was a child. Along with my family, they made me a lover of books — and in time a writer. I don’t know if I’m helping neighborhood kids become writers, but I hope I’m helping them become book and bookstore lovers.

Browser Books, like all independent bookshops, faces many challenges these days, but our relationship with the readers in this neighborhood is what sustains us. It begins with the young ones. One minute they’re reading Harold and the Purple Crayon and before you know it they’re on to War and Peace. After all these years, I still love to watch this development.

To me, that’s the definition of being a local, neighborhood bookseller.

Ken Samuels has worked at Browser Books since 1996.

EARLIER: “Thank God for Browser Books”

Photograph of Arthur Bloomfield by Susie Biehler

By Mark J. Mitchell

You may have read recently that New York author Pete Hamill’s new book is going straight to digital format, skipping print altogether. But the Fillmore’s own Arthur Bloomfield has beaten him to it.

Bloomfield latest book, “More Than the Notes,” made its debut online a few weeks ago and is available at no charge. In addition to his lyrical prose, it includes more than four and a half hours of music clips, enabling readers to hear the precise performances he’s writing about.

Bloomfield is a respected scholar of music, having written “The San Francisco Opera, 1922-1978.” He performed in the Stanford Chorus under both Pierre Monteux and Bruno Walter. He also writes on architecture and cooking in the books “Gables and Fables” and “The Gastronomical Tourist.”

His new book was inspired by a passion for music and the knowledge that there is more to music than the notes on the page. In this era of electronic and digital reproduction, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that each performance of a given piece of music differs from all others. We tend to forget that, if you wanted to hear music as recently as 125 years ago, you had to go where it was being performed or play the music yourself. Bloomfield’s book reminds us.

“More Than the Notes” is about conductors — specifically, conductors who were born in the later half of the 19th century. While we can read about earlier performers and conductors, these are the earliest we can actually hear.

Arthur Bloomfield knows a lot about music and assumes that most of his readers will have some sort of familiarity with the terms, the scores and the composers, if not necessarily all of the conductors he has chosen to spotlight. Because he never condescends, he manages to educate
gently — at least somewhat gently. Music is about passion and Bloomfield is a passionate listener.

Bloomfield grew up around a radio and heard the various weekly broadcasts by the great American orchestras under some of the best batons of all time. There is a joy to the sections of the book in which he recalls the old broadcasts and the enthusiasm he discovered as a child and young man hearing the performances. Of course, he also performed under a couple of the batons, which adds a touching human element to his discussions.

It is the insight that Bloomfield brings, however, that will light up any music lover. He discusses each conductor, providing some biographical information — but more important, he goes into detail about specific performances, giving the dates of the recordings or broadcasts.

The book’s opening essay on Fritz Reiner gives a sense of his flavor and also his subject:

What, forever asks the commentator, does a conductor really do?

Well, he does the sort of thing Fritz Reiner is doing in the full-page portrait decorating his French RCA recording of the Bach orchestral suites. His baton-holding hand raised crisply above his head, a handsome show of starched white shirt-cuff next thereto, he’s fixing the left side of an invisible orchestra with a look that might terrify a Martian, a call to action flamed in part by an instant invocation of stage despair, or maybe it’s the sullen dignity of a challenged monarch (here, now, this instant, the most important thing in the world is your entrance!) while his left hand waits in reserve at waist level, ready to italicize a point.

He is, in other words, mesmerizing his musicians into sharing with him one hundred and one percent, as if by instantaneous transfusion, an emotional moment, some superb phraseological felicity transferable by a magnificent glance. Ordered yet passionate, this optical sting is emblem of a style almost stark in its beauty yet rich in nuance of the subtlest and warmest sort.

This word picture conjures the conductor’s function as well as Bloomfield’s love for music and his musical erudition, which is always laid on lightly.

A few words about the format: This is a book that’s available online only. The conductors are arranged chronologically and you click on a name to read a particular essay. In most books about classical music, there are long musical examples in print. Some books also come with CDs that can be cued up.

But for this book, the online format has a serious advantage. Bloomfield tells you about the details of a performance, then you can click on a link and listen to that exact performance as you read his words. There are also different versions of the same pieces by different conductors, so you can get a strong sense of each musician’s personal style.

“More Than the Notes” will reward you and renew your sense of wonder about serious music. You will find yourself going to your CDs — or vinyl, if you’re of a certain age — and checking to see who is conducting and which pieces they perform. It will attune your ear to the differences among conductors and increase your appreciation of music and music making. And it will also entertain you.

Not bad at all for the web.

Read more: Q&A with Arthur Bloomfield

Neighborhood poet Mark J. Mitchell’s first chapbook, Three Visitors, is being released in September by Negative Capability Press.

What motivated you to write “More Than the Notes,” your new e-book on legendary conductors of the 19th century?

When I was 11, my mother started taking me downtown once a month to the White House department store. It was where Banana Republic is now. Up on the fourth floor they had a record department. She’d buy me old Victor and Columbia albums. And she also gave me a book of record reviews. I said: “What’s the point? Isn’t Beethoven’s Fifth always the same?” She emphatically said no. In a way, that was the genesis of this book.

Even then you lived in the neighborhood?

I grew up in Presidio Heights at Clay and Locust and went to the old Town School on Alta Plaza Park. My father was a professor at Stanford Medical School, which is now California Pacific Medical Center. We would take the No. 4 streetcar along Sacramento Street, down Fillmore to Sutter, make a left and go downtown.

And those trips downtown led you to become a music critic.

In the ’60s and ’70s I was a music critic for the Call-Bulletin, which became the News-Call-Bulletin, and later for the old Examiner. I left the Examiner to become a freelance writer, mostly on music and food. I spent a lot of the 1980s researching the conductors book.

You say the book aims to clear up some of the “received wisdom” about conductors. In what way?

I had long felt there was not a book that made a sufficient distinction between conductors — nor a book that told enough about what conductors really do: What are the decisions they make about tempo, balance, etc., all of which can affect the emotion of the performance as it goes from mood to mood. What this book does, first, is tell the kind of decisions a particular conductor made. You get some sense of how his mind works. And second — and quite important — you get a good idea of the many ways in which the secrets of a score can be discovered. There’s a great quote from the English writer and pianist Susan Tomes: “The score is the map, but not the journey.”

Your book itself is something of a tome.

It’s about 100,000 words. I’ve been working on it a lot for about four years — but I’ve been thinking about it for 30 years.

And yet it’s not a book, but a website with sound clips.

The advent of the technology — to have sound clips — came at a perfect time. It’s on the cutting edge. I wasn’t accustomed to listening to music on my computer, but when I heard the sound coming out, I was ecstatic. And I had Dick Wahlberg a block up Webster Street to help. He also grew up in Presidio Heights. He uses my basement to store part of his record collection and is a great sound engineer. So I had technical help nearby I’d known forever. We had a number of sessions making the clips and decided together when the clips should begin and end. It was uncanny how often we agreed. Sometimes we worked from 78s, sometimes 33s, sometimes open-reel tapes. I had almost all of the clips in my own record library. Maybe I got a couple from Dick, but between us we had them all. Then I delivered my text and the master CD with the sound clips to the site designer and engineer. By some mysterious means, they turned them into a website. What we’ve done may be unique. Just click on the megaphone and you can play the exact passage in the exact Beethoven recording I’m writing about. It’s like a time machine.

This is your third book in recent years — and your second online book.

“The Gastronical Tourist” was published in 2002 and had a life of its own as a book. Then in 2007 we put it online. The numbers went up from practically zero to 60,000. And “Gables and Fables” — the book of Pacific Heights architectural history based on my wife Anne’s columns from the New Fillmore — was published in 2007. It’s still available at Browser Books on Fillmore.

Has it been an adjustment to see this new book online rather than on the bookshelf?

It’s been a revelation. Last night I googled the book. There’s something about turning on the screen and seeing all those cross-references. It’s satisfying — and you certainly get much better numbers. I’m a great devotee of Browser Books. I practically live in there sometimes. So it was a little wrenching at first that this new book won’t be there, or in the symphony shop. But I’ve gotten over that. And it’s free. It’s there for the tasting.

Photograph of Marcus Books manager Karen Johnson by Joe Manio

By Tessa Williams

It would be easy to pass by the purple Victorian at 1712 Fillmore without realizing its importance to Bay Area black history.

Located just north of Post Street, the building’s modest presence belies its legacy, both as the former home of Jimbo’s Bop City — the legendary after-hours jazz club — and as the current home of Marcus Books, the oldest independent black bookstore in the country, which is celebrating half a century in business this year.

Back in 1960, Raye and Julian Richardson recognized a need for the African-American community to have an establishment devoted to selling and promoting books written by black people that dealt with the black experience. They opened the store in their Leavenworth Street print shop that year, and it quickly became an important cultural center and gathering place. A second location was opened in Oakland in the mid-70s, and the San Francisco store settled into its current location on Fillmore in 1980.

It was logical to locate in the Fillmore, a neighborhood with a long history as a bastion of black-owned businesses and African-American artistic contribution. During the height of the Fillmore jazz era, Jimbo’s Bop City hosted the likes of Count Basie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald.

In the ’60s, Marcus Books was a meeting place for the Black Panthers and other activist groups, and one of the first business establishments in San Francisco to host regular book clubs and poetry slams.

For 50 years, Marcus Books has been very much a family affair. After Julian Richardson died in 2000, Raye Richardson took over as the sole owner. She lives one floor above the Fillmore shop with her daughter, Blanche Richardson, a book editor and the manager of Marcus Books’ outpost in Oakland. Blanche’s daughter, Cherysse, also helps run the Oakland store.

Karen Johnson, another of Raye and Julian Richardson’s four children, lives on the third floor with her husband Gregory. Karen and her daughter, Tamiko Johnson, manage Marcus Books in San Francisco, and Gregory has been involved with running the store since retiring as a hospital administrator in 2005.

Over five decades, the family has witnessed much activity at their bookstores. An astonishingly long list of writers, thinkers, actors and luminaries have appeared there — from Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Cornel West and August Wilson to Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, B.B. King and Dave Chappelle.
“Authors want to be here,” said Gregory Johnson. “It’s an honor to be at Marcus Books.”

Marcus Books is commemorating half a century of bookselling by sponsoring several community events celebrating African-American contributions to American culture. Later in the year, it will host a Motown celebration with a showcase at the Fillmore Auditorium, and has also planned a poetry competition.

It recently began the Scholar Book Fund, a literacy and educational program that pairs young black students with mentors from Public Allies, the Americorps-affiliated organization of community activists and volunteers. The program is designed to promote reading and a commitment to education and to give students “the preparation to go through the educational system and achieve the goals of life,” Gregory said.
Celebrating 50 years in business in such a way is in keeping with the store’s founding principles. “It goes back to the vision of Raye and Julian Richardson,” said Gregory, “who gave their entire hearts to the community.”

Marcus Books’ status as a cultural institution and a cornerstone of the community has not, unfortunately, made it immune to the hardships that other independently owned local bookstores have suffered during the last several years. The rise of online booksellers and chain bookstores have changed the bookselling landscape profoundly — a serious problem for those who value bookstores for not only the products they sell but also the sense of community they create. Marcus has been adapting to these changes by developing Marcus Books Social Network, an online community that fosters lively discussions about books and issues affecting African-Americans, which will soon feature a system for purchasing books through the network.

More than the bookselling landscape has been altered in the last several years: The Fillmore itself has undergone significant changes. “We’ve seen the vibrant African-American community migrate out because of a lack of affordable housing and jobs,” Gregory said. “But this is a great place to live — with small boutique businesses, parks, theatres and jazz music. Where else can you go on the Fourth of July and see thousands of people listening to jazz?”

The annual Fillmore Jazz Festival draws throngs of revelers to the street, but the show that takes place in front of Marcus Books each year is special. Many bands gather in front of the store to play, and scores of music-lovers congregate to watch. “The musical history of the store draws musicians,” said Karen Johnson.

The Richardsons recently received word that the Fillmore building housing Marcus Books will be designated a cultural landmark by the National Register of Historical Sites.

“We have great support here in the community, which we attribute to an unquenchable thirst for books by and about black people,” Gregory Johnson said. “We love it here. And our intent is to be part of the landscape of the community for the next 50 years — and beyond.”

The Presidio Branch Library on Sacramento Street, now undergoing renovation, became legendary in literary circles after author Richard Brautigan used it as the setting for his imaginary library of unpublished manuscripts in the novel, The Abortion.

In Brautigan’s novel, published in 1970, the library was always open for authors to personally deposit their manuscripts. Through the years, quite a few writers took the story literally and submitted manuscripts or asked if the library really existed.

The Presidio library maintained a small display about Brautigan’s novel, but never actually accepted manuscripts. But in 1990 one of the author’s fans opened the Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont, and accepted several hundred manuscripts. That arrangement ended in 2005 when negotiations were announced to bring the manuscripts to the Presidio Branch Library. But it never happened.

Now the manuscripts have found a new home. The Brautigan Library will become a permanent collection in the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Washington. Brautigan was a Washington native.

Local aficionados, including library volunteer Marcia Popper, continue to push for an expanded display about the Brautigan connection when the renovated Presidio Branch Library reopens in late 2011.

EARLIER: A homecoming for Richard Brautigan