Collections

The Sacramento Collection

The Sacramento Collection represents years of selective acquisition in an effort to gather together the best possible books, maps, photographs, and ephemera dealing with Sacramento City and County, past and present. What will be of interest to patrons a century from now is one of the concerns today. Cookbooks to sports stats, education to environmental studies—if it is about Sacramento, it should be included in the Sacramento Collection.

City Directories date from the first one issued in 1851. Historians find these directories to be invaluable research tools, using them to find people, businesses, and organizations.

Numerous County Histories are available in the Sacramento Room. The most well known is the Thompson & West History of Sacramento County California, published in 1880.

Yearbooks from many local high schools are popular items. Those from Sacramento and McClatchy High Schools date back to the schools' beginnings. The Sacramento Room actively seeks donations of local high school yearbooks, as well as those from middle and grammar schools.

The oldest telephone book in the Sacramento Room dates to 1899. A quarter-of-an-inch thick, the areas it covers include Washington and Oregon, as well as California. The Telephone Book collection is, for the most part, complete and includes the current year.

Periodicals published in and about Sacramento, include Sacramento magazine, Sacramento Bungalow Heritage Association newsletter, Sacramento Comment, The Californian, and Weinstock-Lubin Company's Store News.

Thomas Bros. Map books date back to 1937. The oldest, annotated to include the names of property owners, was updated in 1953. There are also Sanborn maps, street maps, and aerial photograph maps of the city and county.