New Publications

2013. BCC Publication number 231. The Companion Volume to California in Relief: Thirty Wood Engravings by Richard Wagener, The Book Club of California, 2009.

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Join us for a publication party, Monday, June 3, 5-7 pm at the Book Club. With an illustrated talk by Richard Wagener and remarks by Peter Koch.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
—John Muir

John Muir reminds us that a life lived without great rocky outcrops and ageless trees as part of one’s native landscape would be a life deprived of one of the greatest resources of the sublime. Richard Wagener’s engravings capture an essential quality of that friendship.

The thirty-one prints in this special edition were hand-engraved on end-grain boxwood and relief-printed by Richard Wagener. The majority have been produced between 2010 and 2013. The present work is a companion volume to California in Relief, published by the Book Club in 2009, and continues a legacy of wide acclaim, ingenuity, and beauty.

By Claudine Chalmers. With a Preface by Philip P. Choy.

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Artist Paul Frenzeny, a Frenchman of noble descent, strict military training, and encyclopedic knowledge, became one of the leading “special correspondents” in the United States and Europe in the days when woodcuts, rather than photographs, were used to illustrate newspapers. In 1873, Frenzeny undertook a year-long sketching tour of the frontier for Harper’s Weekly, with fellow artist Jules Tavernier. This 100-sketch assignment proved to be an irresistible subject for author Claudine Chalmers, who then followed the Frenchmen’s careers after their journey’s end on the Pacific Coast. As she patiently gathered Frenzeny’s subsequent illustrations in the Weekly, Dr. Chalmers discovered that he had depicted San Francisco’s Chinese culture in all its pageantry and intensity, at a time when most of the white population, within California and across the country, reviled the pioneering Chinese laborers and repressed them in every way possible. 

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This special collection of photographs by the Los Angeles documentary photographer William Reagh examines and showcases his work from the mid-to late twentieth century. The 130 photographs, selected by Patrick Reagh and Michael Dawson, reflect William Reagh’s perspective on urban renewal and change in Los Angeles during the years in which he worked. There are images of Angels Flight, Bunker Hill, Pershing Square, Broadway, Grand Avenue, Hill Street, Wrigley Field, Chavez Ravine, and people, lots and lots of people. Many of the photographs from earlier decades are juxtaposed with photographs from later decades, taken from the same location and vantage point. In these, it becomes clear how dramatically the city changed over the years, and Reagh’s documentation of that change becomes all the more profound. The Book Club of California is proud to offer this chronicle of a city over time, a gift from a photographer with an endlessly fascinated sensibility, for all who should wish to revisit Los Angeles in the future.

Cyclone on the Prairies: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Arts & Crafts of Publishing in Chicago, 1900 [With an original leaf from the first edition of L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz printed in Chicago in 1900] by Peter E. Hanff, and the companion volume, A Bookbinder’s Analysis of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Michael O. Riley. These two works bring together important new scholarship on the printing and design history of an American classic.