The final Hearst Building at Market and Third in San Francisco, 2017

           

[1] Hearst Building.

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, for his daily newspaper The Examiner, used several buildings in San Francisco, California. His final one still stands, on the corner of Market and Third — the rebuilt office tower from 1911. The city had eight cable car routes at the time and many cable cars crossed in front of the building. But paper as well as cable cars have since long moved elsewhere. These photos were especially taken for Yesterday's Papers on the 4th of February, 2017.

Photos by Bas Peters

          

[2] In 1938, the 1911 front and lobby were revamped.

[3]

[4] The cut-off SE corner with front entrance. View into Third Street at the South of Market side.

[5] Market Street. View southwest, to Upper Market. Hearst’s earlier office in Market Street (1887 to 1898) was just a block away on the right, corner of Market and Grant.

[6] Market Street. View northeast, to the Ferry Building. Palace Hotel second block on the right. Former San Francisco Chronicle building on the left. Drive down or zoom in on the Ferry tower…

[7]

[8] Entrance to the cocktail bar now housed in Hearst’s former printing basement. Huge rolls of newsprint for The Examiner were loaded down here since 1898 in Hearst’s first office tower, a building destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. 

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More about Hearst in the upcoming biography and reading of Jimmy Swinnerton (1875-1974) by Huib van Opstal.

The Respectable Papers of Boston and Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, 1842

Gloucester Telegraph, Sep 16, 1842

EXTRA, NO. IX. The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, often labeled “the first American comic book”, first issued to subscribers as a 40-page ‘Extra, No. IX’ issue of Brother Jonathan weekly in New York, and dated September 14, 1842, was a reworked bootleg version in English of Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer’s comic strip Les Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois or Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois (1827, Geneva album published 1837). 

If Oldbuck might be called the first American comic book, the following short newspaper quip might be called the first criticism of comic books in America,

Does the “Brother Jonathan” often humbug the public with such trash as the “Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck”? The respectable papers of Boston should not become a party to such impositions by puffing them. — Gloucester [Massachusetts] Telegraph, Sep 16, 1842

Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846), self-portrait

  

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