Odds and quads

Helen and Edith Chesebrough rest on the steps with their Airedale terriers - Rough, Radiance and Master Nobbler - in Burlingame, California in 1917. Three years later, Anita Blake poses with a lapdog and two borzois in the celebrated gardens of the Blake Estate in the San Francisco Bay town of Kensington, later bequeathed to the University of California, Berkeley.

January 12, 2012



Credit: Photos courtesy of The Bancroft Library


Like the 1890 image of a boy and his pooch on campus and the affecting scene from one of the tent cities that sprang up in San Francisco after a 1906 earthquake, these pictures are from the collections of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. They came to light when Mary Scott and Susan Snyder were researching an exhibition on Californian women, and are among the 75 photographs featured in their recently published book Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays and Other Notable Dates.

They are accompanied by tributes, observations and quotes also drawn from the Bancroft collections, such as "My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dog already thinks I am" (anonymous) and "Dog: A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship" (Ambrose Bierce).

Send suggestions for this series on the treasures, oddities and curiosities owned by universities across the world to: matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com.

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