History Detective pt. 1

I have worked at Half Price Books (the one in Crystal MN) for almost four years now, and in that time have bought a vast number of books from the public. The majority of the time it's just run of the mill stuff--mystery and romance paperbacks, the latest Jodi Picoult, Twilight, etc. It's what Half Price calls the "bread and butter" of our stock: we pretty much always have copies on the shelf because there's just a lot of those types of books out there.

There's also a large amount of stuff that's just in very poor shape that gets recycled right away: severe water damage, mold (ick! that's when we don gloves), questionable substances (is that blood?), bodily fluids of various kinds (oh, hello, cat pee), books with no covers, kids' titles that have bite marks and are ripped almost in two, etc. You get the idea.

Every now and then though I get to uncover a real treasure. My hands once held a book worth over $2,000! (it was on Marc Chagall with a series of original etchings by him included; there were only about 1,000 copies ever printed) Another time, I noticed this small book about magic in a stack I was going through and on a whim just decided to look it up on the Internet. It was selling for $300 online! I think we ended up selling it for $150 in my store. Books like these don't pass through my hands very often, but when they do it's always a treat.

Last week, I found this in a box I was going through:

Seems pretty innocuous at first glance, right? You can't really see it in this picture, but most of the spine covering has fallen off. It's a little beat up and worn but still intact. I flipped it open and saw this written inside the cover:

It's a little hard to read in the picture, but it says:
Blanche Warden
2112 Humboldt Ave
Minneapolis MN

Well, my interest was piqued since that's a local address. I immediately knew that this was also a very old book and that the person who owned it was probably quite well off. How did I deduce all that from only an address? The age I guessed by a few things: One, the writing style tipped me off. And two, it was before the avenues in Minneapolis were given North and South designations, so that tells me the city was still small. If it was Humboldt Ave N, I know that part of Minneapolis wasn't developed until the housing boom following World War II. So I knew that it had to be what is now Humboldt Ave S, which is a well-to-do residential area to this day. It's less than two miles from downtown, and that part of southwest Minneapolis is near the Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun with many beautiful historic homes lining the streets. If you lived there during the 1900s, you had money.

That whole thought process took about 5 seconds as I flipped to the pages written on. There's a section at the front meant to be for contact and address information, which sadly is blank. The first entry is dated December 28 with no year.

Turning a few pages though, revealed an entry marked January 1, 1910. So I was right about the age! Skimming a few entries, I quickly realized I was spot on about this girl's socio-economic status as well. I caught a sentence where she wrote, "Henry called on me in his machine." So she had a friend who was rich enough to own an automobile in 1910 (the Model T had only just made its debut two years prior). I read snatches of this or that person calling for her while she was out, so this girl's family had their own phone. And mostly what I saw in my brief perusal was how many parties she went to and how late she got up in the morning.

I didn't think the person who is in charge of the Nostalgia section would put this out for sale, since it's just an old diary. But it was local, so I thought it might be of some interest. I put a note on it saying if it wasn't going to be priced up, I wanted it just to read through the entries. A few days later, I got it and have slowly been making my way through Blanche Warden's notes on her social life.

I'm only on page 40 (very glad that it was printed with page numbers) but what a glimpse I'm getting into Minneapolis of 1910. This is what I've learned so far:

I guessed Blanche was in her late teens, because she mentions going to school, doing some studying, writing a book report about David Copperfield, starting a new term at the end of January and skipping 6th period to go to the Orpheum. And does she go to the Orpheum a lot! I'm only into mid-February and I think I've read at least seven mentions of Blanche and her friends going to that theatre. It was apparently quite the social event, because she writes about feeling like the whole town was there for one event. Another time she writes "we sat in an upper box." Yup, definitely rich.
Blanche was quite the party girl, because most of what she writes is the names of the people who came over to visit or whose houses she went to call at or who was at so-and-so's party and how late she stayed out. I know she had well-off friends, because in one entry from January, she notes that they were served pineapple and cookies at someone's home.
Also, one last name caught my eye--the Calhouns were over for a visit one day. I'm guessing this is probably the family that the lake is named after.
Blanche also notes offhandedly in early January that, "We got a new cook today," and in another entry that, "We only have one girl now," which I'm assuming was a servant.
Also, when she writes of riding in a "car," it's not an automobile but a street car. I bet you didn't know that Minneapolis and St. Paul had a very extensive street car system back in the day (and then they tore it all up, because buses were the wave of the future, and now we're paying tons of money to put lightrail in, but I digress).

Streetcar map from 1913

From this map, I realized that Blanche had a street car line run right by her house, which she could take straight downtown, which she mentions doing on a number of occasions.
Usually though she would get a ride with her friends, either in a carriage or the aforementioned "machine;" a couple times she's given a ride home in a "limousine," which I'm guessing is a bit different than what we think of today.
Blanche writes often of feeling tired and getting up late in the morning (I wonder why when she stayed up so late partying), though in mid-February she comes down with typhoid fever! She doesn't write from February 24 through March 16 because she was so sick, mentioning she had a temperature of 103 at one point!
That's on page 39, where I stopped reading last night.

I've written so far of what I deduced from my knowledge of Minneapolis history, and what I've learned from reading what Blanche wrote, but in the next post I'll share with you what my younger brother, Andrew, uncovered after doing a little sleuthing online.