I received many lovely gifts for my first round of the Holiday Gift Exchange—I will participate in a few more before the end of January. Actually, I wish the whole gift exchange and focus of festivities would switch back to the New Years, a nice neutral place, or the Solstice proper. I adore the Holiday season and the light displays and I hate that they inspire admittedly justified feelings of resentment from non-Christians—I caught “the Grinch who stole Christmas” on Christmas Day and—damn—those Whos down in Whoville came across particularly smug.

But I’m getting sidetracked. Like I said, many nice gifts. But one that really hooked me and stood out was a gift from the Spouse, a book he saw and bought spontaneously while searching for something else. The title: Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook’s Lowbrow Northwest. This book is a collection of articles and essays by Holbrook, a journalistic historian whose mission was “to put into books the figures or portions of American history that I think have largely ignored or badly treated.” He scorned the pioneer heroes in preference for the stories of loggers, rascals, prophets, Wobblies, lunatics and the low-lifes.

Clearly, I’m really enjoying this book. He deals mostly with the period of American history I’m most intrigued with as well as the angle I’m most interested in. And what I’ve read of Holbrook, I am really liking him as well. He was a New England native who chose to live in Portland in 1923 “because Portland has the finest public library in the West.” He wrote constantly, producing 3000 to 5000 words a day: books, essays and articles for a wide range of magazines. At the height of his popularity, when he was confronted with a steady stream of letters, he composed the following form postcard, “Dear Sir or Madam: You may be right at that. Sincerely, Stewart Holbrook.”

So, when running some errands this morning along Hawthorne, I stopped into the Powell’s to see what books they had by him. I did find a few, including an overview of the Pacific Northwest where he recounts the infamous coin toss for the naming of Portland, Oregon—Mr. Pettygrove, a native of Maine, voted for Portland,

whereas Mr. Lovejoy wanted Boston, his hometown. Beyond this, these men are best known for the streets named after them in Northwest Portland, which then, for Lovejoy at least, translates to a character on The Simpsons. ( I used to live in a house on the corner of Simpson and Albina in North Portland—with Kip and Barry, in fact)

But I actually chose to buy another book called Nineteenth Street, a pictorial overview of historic mansions on a street right near where Kip and I used to live in Northwest Portland, built by families whose names also live on in street names about Portland: Flanders, Glisan, Burns, Weidler, etc.

Within this book I found my dream house:

Perversely, I would want the interiors to be classic Craftsman with Mackintosh stencil art to resolve the odder shapes. What can I say: ideally I’d have a house near impossible to draw on the outside and gridded for easier perspective drawing on the inside.

I recognize most of the houses in this book, even those that don’t exist. Portland is fond of putting up plaques about town with pictures of what used to be there. Most of these pictures are from the archives of the Oregon Historical Society, like the photos from Nineteenth Street and the anonymous photo above. I adore then-and-now photo pairs in general; I did my own for our house, albeit the time lapse was only a year.

And certainly not as sophisticated as the Archaeological Collage done by Gregory Cosmo Haun. I’m particularly fond of the Portland Hotel collage. He also uses the OHS as a source for historical shots. And I’m pretty sure I know where he got the aerial photo shot on his page about his Belmont Dairy Mural.

Portland Maps is an awesome resource of information maps for I guess every address in Portland. Here is the result of a random address I entered. Then I went to the map overview for it: property, zoning, water, elevation and so on. Naturally, I am most attracted to the aerial shots.

But I adore maps in general. And that was actually what Kip was looking for in the first place, when he came across the Stewart Holbrook book. You see, my other gift from Kip is a trip to British Columbia. In particular to the Broken Islands off of Vancouver Island. Seems there’s this one named Dicebox Island…