Past Exhibits

War has been a central feature in every society, from the Ancients to today. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of November 11, 1918 which ended the fighting of World War I. With hundreds of thousands of books written on the subject – ranging from battles to strategy to emergency medical care on the field, to the machinery of warfare-- the Sutro Library will display a varied and diverse collection of our holdings on the subject.  There will be unique artifacts, books, and...

​Frank Silva was born in Oakland, CA and began working on the Oakland waterfront in 1965 after serving in the US Navy. While working on the docks in the 1970s and 1980s, Silva was a part of the Waterfront Writers and Artists, a group of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members who held poetry readings and art shows celebrating dock work and the union experience. In the late-1970s, Harper and Row published The Waterfront Writers highlighting their work, and many of the...

The Enlightenment fueled Europeans to embark on voyages of discovery during the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century. Mounted as purely scientific ventures, they sought to gather specimens and to document and catalog newly discovered flora and fauna that would crowd the cabinets of Natural History Museums. Illustrations were meant to be practical, but they also reflect Enlightenment ideals in their beauty and extra flourishes, perspectives where art and science meet.

San Francisco State has been involved with publishing since the 1910s when founding president Frederic Burk took on California State textbooks to introduce individualized instruction. During the Great Depression our yearbooks and newspapers garnered awards, but when our students applied creativity to graphic design, the artist books they produced were stellar. Come see a small sampling of publications produced at San Francisco State from 1910 to 2016.