The Sunday Call, October 16, 1892

Have you heard of the newspaper that predated the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner? It's known as the San Francisco Call, although it had a handful of name variations over its fifty-plus year lifespan. 

Today we're talking about the Morning Call, the iteration of the paper from 1878-1895. The Sunday special edition of the paper during this time was called the Sunday Call. 

Read More about the Morning Call

Most of the issues are not lost to the sands of time: at SFPL, the Magazines and Newspapers Center has this newspaper available in our microfilm collection; in fact, the newspaper is almost fully digitized on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America database and the California Newspaper Digital Collection (CNDC). That's a big win for historians and researchers looking into 19th century and early 20th century California.

However, one stubborn issue was elusive: the October 16, 1892 Sunday Call is nowhere to be found in these digital repositories or in our microfilm. 

Calendar view of digitized issues of the Morning Call from the CNDC with a red circle around the missing October 19, 1892 issue.

Box housing the microfilm roll of the September and October issues of the 1892 Morning Call. The box has been annotated to indicate the October 16 issue is missing.

Last week the Magazines and Newspapers Center got an incredible opportunity to address this elision when a representative from the Los Angeles Public Library delivered a bound volume of the Morning Call containing issues from the last four months of 1892, September, October, November, and December. A patron had donated it to them, and it being in bad condition and outside of their geographic interest, they reached out to SFPL to see if we wanted it. After some quick research, our team of amazing library assistants and library technicians was able to identify that this missing issue could be part of the bound volume on offer. We agreed to accept the very large tome measuring 20" x 25" even though this breaks with our typical practice of not accepting donations. (We leave that up to the SF History Center, and even they didn't want it!) Upon carefully unwrapping the tome and opening up, one Magazines and Newspapers Center librarian said, "Seeing the issue was so exciting! I felt like Indiana Jones, like we were the only people on earth to see it after all these years! Like a lost monument hidden in the desert."

LAPL had warned us: it's in bad condition, and they were right. That's to be expected on almost anything printed on paper in the second half of the 19th century, when paper was manufactured from wood pulp high in lignin content and was therefore acidic, quickly becoming brittle. That's why we don't have print copies of historic newspapers at the Magazines and Newspapers Center, instead offering the newspapers on the more stable format of microfilm. Due to the extremely brittle nature of the Morning Call in the bound volume, this object will not be available to the public. 

But, we carefully digitized the elusive October 16, 1892 issue of the Sunday Call for posterity. While we are still working out a permanent way to make this digitized issue more accessible, we present to you now a sneak peak. Enjoy!