Monthly Archives: September 2011

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Tea with Grace

A drawing by Grace Gebbie Wiederseim Drayton (1877-1936) from her book Kiddie Land (1910). Mrs. Drayton is best remembered as the creator of the Campbell Kids; her first art for a Campbell’s Soup print ad was published in 1904.

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Old Potrero

I have written about San Francisco whiskey before, and with good reason, but today I have an even better reason. Yesterday afternoon, a foretaste of paradise was vouchsafed unto me, courtesy of my sainted friend Dave and his sainted brother Tim, who sent a bottle of Old Potrero from San Francisco. Oh my goodness. I know this isn’t “Read, Seen, Heard, Tasted,” but this is a work of art and I include it on that basis.

Thank God for Fritz Maytag and all the good people at Anchor, and my congratulations to them on these triumphs, crafted at their distillery in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, first named by missionaries who grazed cattle on the hill and called the area potrero nuevo, Spanish for “new pasture.”

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The Gift Reformative

“Upon my shelves I can find no sharper contrast than that between the gift-book and the book-gift, the latter being a volume selected because it represents the giver’s taste, or else what he thinks is my taste, or, still worse, what he thinks ought to be my taste if it isn’t… And should the book-gift go a step farther, should you have reason to suspect it of the donor’s effort at proselytism, of an intention to convert you to opinions, human or literary, that you are not ready to accept, then the poor little book-gift becomes that most dangerous kind of Christmas remembrance, the Gift Reformative, the switch in the Christmas stocking.”

– Winifred Kirkland in “Gift-Books and Book-Gifts,” in The View Vertical and Other Essays (1920)