A historian reviews Seattle Contrasts
Washington Historical Quarterly · April 1913
In the story: 2. The Taboo, 1913.
The Washington Historical Quarterly reviewed the club’s picture book in April 1913.
The Washington Historical Quarterly noticed the club’s picture book in April 1913, three months after the first annual dinner, and printed the whole of what it had to say about it. It is the only scholarly attention the Emblem Club is known to have had.
The review is worth having twice over. It confirms the club as the book’s publisher — “the very modest imprint of The Emblem Club as publishers” — and it describes a book nobody has found: full-page pictures, each one a modern Seattle scene above the same scene from two to thirty years before, with no letterpress at all.
It also places the club exactly where the rest of the record puts it. A Bend club publishing a picture book about Seattle is the same booster network as the Potlatch booth of July 1912, the Seattle Ad Club dinner that November and a founder whose company was a Seattle firm. The Quarterly saw it clearly and said so: “frankly an advertisement by the promoters of a new townsite in Oregon”.
The passage runs across a page break in the Quarterly and is kept as the two parts it is printed in. The booklet itself remains to be located.
From the source
SEATTLE CONTRASTS. By The Emblem Club of Bend, Oregon.
This is frankly an advertisement by the promoters of a new townsite in Oregon, but it is unique enough to merit mention. It contains no advertising whatever, except the very modest imprint of The Emblem Club as publishers. The book is a series of full-page pictures. The upper part of each picture is a modern view of some Seattle scene and the lower part of that page is the same scene from two to thirty years before, as the case may be. In each case the contrast is wonderfully striking. As letter press explanation would be superfluous, it has been dispensed with and the fortunate owner of the booklet is permitted to allow the pictures to tell their own stories. It is hardly necessary to add that the pictures are worth saving to mark how the contrasts will increase as the city continues to grow.
