GGIE, Ruth Taylor and the Treasure Island Cartograph
Historical Essay
by Kenneth Stein
I recently got a poster size copy of this classic 1939 two-sided map (there called a “Cartograph”) of the World’s Fair on Treasure Island.
This one is a bit larger than the foldout frontispiece versions that graced the inside covers of the 1939 and 1940 Official Guidebooks to the Fair.
Normally I would not have wanted this one, being a problem to store and display, but happened to have a good, thick two-sided see-through plastic holder for it.
Oh … The Fine Print
On the back it says:
“Copies of this map, on heavy paper, suitable for framing, inserted in closed tube, 15 cents. Folded, ready for mailing, 10 cents. Available at Crocker stands on Treasure Island, at newsstands, or by mail. For mail order-add 3 cents. Address The Crocker Company, 720 Mission Street, San Francisco, California.”
And on the front lower right:
“Copyright 1939 by San Francisco Bay Exposition” and “Cartograph [an illustrated map] by Ruth Taylor”
Turns out that she was quite somebody. Please see: Ruth Taylor White: The Great Cartographer With an Asterisk.
Looking again at that map and reading the headline, I had a feeling that turned out to be true—not from that article, but from the worldwide Web—that she also did this old GGIE era postcard (originally a poster).
“CaricaTour of San Francisco: A Character Tour in Caricature”
Postmarked May 1940.
“This CARICATOUR of San Francisco is an animated post card map, touring in caricature the many points of interest to be found in the city by the Golden Gate. For information regarding Caricatour cards of other locales, write Caricatour Company, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.”
Her name isn’t anywhere on the card front or back, only the company.
Some Closeups
The postcard says copyright 1936 and 1937 by “The Caricatour Company,”which turns out also to be Ruth Taylor. Pardon the aside, but one of the great benefits of being a collector is continually rediscovering your ability to meet and begin to care about so many good people along the way.
In addition to everything else, that article notes:
“… Staying in Northern California she created a masterpiece for a booklet on the Golden Gate Exposition including Treasure Island in 1939.”
The booklet being
The masterpiece being referred to is that map… Which I note is currently for sale by the Treasure Island Museum as a jigsaw puzzle, a mousepad, and a totebag.
That Guidebook, in addition to any-and-everything else, contains one of my all-time favorite typos, in an ad for the Brazilian Pavilion.
Just as ‘for want of a nail, a shoe was lost,’ in the instant case, for want of an accent mark, everyone was invited to “sip real Brazilian coffee or mate amid restful tropic surroundings.”
I do know that this was corrected in the 1940 “Second Edition” of that Guidebook.
By that time, GGIE having fallen upon hard economic times, this second edition has significantly fewer pages than the first, is printed on cheap brown acidic ‘wartime’ type paper, and lacked the handy little chapter finger tabs that were in the first edition.
In any case, by the Second Edition they had seen the error of their ways and cleaned up their text:
The language here reads: Delicious Brazilian coffee, or maté (South American tea) is served in CAFE BRAZIL every day except Monday, for ten cents, with dainty wafers.
What I did not discover until recently was that there was a ‘replacement’/revised likewise so-called ‘First Edition’ which responded to the embarrassing gaff, by redoing/barely squeezing in that one word, putting it in italics, and inscrutably, putting the accent mark *after* the e rather than over it.
so the passage now reads “be our guests at the Cafe Brazil, where you may sip real Brazilian coffee or mate'amid [stet] restful tropical surroundings.
e’ for effort.
Both guide books were published by the Crocker company, a division of HS Crocker Co Inc. The map is always referred to as just a map, without giving any credit to Ruth Taylor. Even Wikipedia, on its GGIE page—which uses that map as its profile picture for the entire fair—doesn’t give any credit to Ruth Taylor for having done the map.
I think it’s because she was a woman artist. If she had been a man she would likely be named and remembered for having created this iconic “masterpiece”.
Not a bit at all unlike the fate that befell U.C. Berkeley’s Grace Elwood Hoover. Ref: Her name was Grace (2023)