Seattle City Directory for 1899 13th Year
Seattle: Polk's Seattle Directory Co., Publishers, 1899. Illustrated throughout with commercial graphic design. First Thus. Hardcover. Stout 8vo. Pp1159. Rebacked with original black cloth spine, with gilt lettering, laid down, over gray printed boards. Contains a history of the city with all manner of boosterism facts and figures. Laden with ads for all manner of businesses. Covers rubbed and a bit worn at edges. An old newspaper article taped to the front free endpaper looks back wistfully on "Old Seattle," reminiscing about the pleasures found in old Polk directories. Withal, a handsome, sturdy copy. Good+. Item #5173 Among the most poignant are those for transportation, extractive industries, and Rainier Beer (ad on the spine, providing one of the finer examples of shelf appeal), for generations the mother's milk of adolescence accorded pet names as varied as Vitamin R and Rawn-yay. Nevermind that it tastes like beer-flavored water. The ad is featured when the city was burgeoning: As the starting point for the Klondike Gold Rush, the impact of thousands of stampeders increased Seattle's population to a magnitude not surpassed since the arrival of Microsoft and Amazon. As usual, Polk's is chock-a-block full of ads for 1899 Seattle. See SOLIDAY III, 821.
Provides a rich, insightful glimpse of Seattle a decade after the Great Seattle Fire, rebounding substantially as it unexpectedly awaits the vast surge in population occasioned by the Alaska Gold Rushes. Contains ads for the City of Ballard, and for Columbia City: "Good Schools, Pure Water, No Saloons, Good Car Service, Low Taxes." With an impressive list of residents of Seattle and, of course, a bevy of ads for national, Northwest and Seattle businesses.
Price: $1,150.00