O'Melveny, Stuart
The Romance of California Land Titles
Title Insurance and Trust Company, Los Angeles: 1928
- $150
First edition; 7 x 5; pp. 3-23; light-brown, pictorial wraps decorated in blue; illustrated with numerous drawings and from photographs; mild wear around margins and a few very minor spots; in very good condition.An uncommon piece of California history, the booklet discussed the business of proving the legality of title to a property from the perspective of the state's unique circumstances and complexities of land claims and exchanges, dating back to the Spanish and Mexican land grants in the late-18th- and early-19th centuries (Grenier, J. (1993). In Growing Together for a Century: Southern California and the Title Insurance and Trust Company). In November of 1886, the Abstract and Title Insurance Company would be founded - the first company in Los Angeles to issue abstracts and certificates of titles. Its rival, the Los Angeles Abstract Company would be established a year later. After the land bust of the late 1880s, the two companies would merge to form the Title Insurance and Trust Company in 1893.
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Manuscript Inheritance Receipt of a Colonial Businesswoman
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A Small Group of Currier & Ives Lithographs
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Jane Scott
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John Beltramo, Wanted for Grand Larceny, $50 Reward
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Joseph Haydn
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General Plan. Tenth Annual California Flower Festival, September 15th – 19th, 1934, Exposition Bldg – Oakland. Alameda County’s Most Colorful Civic Event
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Krasnaia shapochka (Little Red Riding Hood) [A Movable Book]
Anonymous First edition, n. d. (1920s); 9 x 7; pp. [10]; card stock wraps, with a chromolothograph to the front wrap, incorporating two illustrations from the story, a frame within a frame; illustrated with black-and-white lithographed drawings and four full-page chromolithographed plates with pull-tab, movable parts; small rust spots around staples; a bit of wear to edges and corners; in very good condition.According to a lengthy research by Walter Iwaskiw and Barbara Dash of the Library of Congress on this beautiful and rare edition of the classic fairy tale (as per OCLC - the only copy at an institution) - ".sometimes the circumstances surrounding the publication of a single book can lead one into an unfamiliar realm of publishing and cultural history." The first question asked was why would Orenshtein, an Ukrainian-Jewish publisher, release a book in Russian, in the town of Kolomyia, or even in Kyiv, which were under Austrian rule from 1772 until 1918. Even more puzzling, for the fact that his publishing firm, founded in 1903, was known for its high-quality, affordable Ukrainian-language books. The answer to this might have been that after Galicia was occupied by Russia, then recovered by Austria, and then reoccupied by Russia between 1914 and 1918, all Ukrainian cultural institutions were shut down and efforts were made to introduce Russian into the educational system. Or, the book was intended as a special item to be marketed among Russophiles in the area. At some point during that time, Orenshtein was arrested and exiled to Russia, ceasing publishing altogether. After the end of WWI, he reemerged in Kyiv, where he opened a bookstore. He also founded a publishing house with branches in Leipzig and Berlin and between 1919 and 1932 he would publish many literary works, dictionaries, and approximately 40 children's books. Ultimately, Orenshtein would perish in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during WWII. The second question was who was the artist and who supplied the movable paper technology for a very-modestly-produced publication. It turned out that Sully and Kleinteich in New York had published, around the same time, an English-language edition of "Red Riding Hood" with the same four movable chromolithographs (possibly) by Ethel Dewees. Did Orenshtein obtain the plates during a trip to the US he took in 1921? Or, as was the tradition of that period to have the major publishers of American and British children's illustrated books get their color printing done in Germany, perhaps Orenshtein had acquired the plates from the same European source? (W.R. Iwaskiw and B.L. Dash, "The mystery of Yakiv Orenshtain's Little Red Riding Hood" in Slavic & East European Information Resources, vol. 11, nos. 2-3 (Apr.-Sept. 2010), p. 120-135).- $1,250
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