Lost 1875 poetry book returns to San Francisco library

A faded 1875 first-edition poetry book has come back to the Mechanics’ Institute Library, offering San Francisco a rare physical trace of what survived the 1906 earthquake and fire and what did not.

Echoes of the Foot-Hills was returned in April to the library near Montgomery Street and the Financial District after collector Randall Schwed found it listed on an online marketplace for $35 and donated it in December 2025. The volume’s pages are smoke-darkened, the binding is worn, and Mechanics’ Institute markings are stamped throughout, turning the book itself into a survivor record from one of the city’s defining disasters.

The return carries weight because San Francisco’s library collections were devastated on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, when the earthquake struck around 5:12 a.m. and fires raged for three days. Nearly 500 city blocks burned, more than half of the city’s population was left homeless, and the San Francisco Public Library lost 138,000 volumes. Of the roughly 15,000 books checked out at the time, only about 1,500 ever came back. Mechanics’ Institute’s original brick building also collapsed, taking about 200,000 volumes with it.

Myles Cooper, the library’s manager and archivist, said the book could have followed several paths after the disaster. “It could have been in the rubble,” he said, “and somebody took it.” The name Agnes Quigley, written inside the cover, remains a mystery and hints at the private hands that may have carried the book through the city’s ruin.

The Mechanics’ Institute predates the public library, founded in 1854 to serve out-of-work miners and working-class San Franciscans. Its current historic library, a two-story Beaux-Arts building designed by Albert Pissis and completed in 1910, now holds more than 110,000 volumes and about 2,200 household memberships. The institution says it still preserves records from its founding era, even though most of the original collection and archives were lost in 1906.

Echoes of the Foot-Hills is now available only for reading inside the library, not circulation, underscoring its value as both a working item and a historical artifact. In a city that lost so much of its written memory to fire, each surviving book helps rebuild the archive that San Francisco still depends on.