In summer 2016, The Emperor Norton Trust launched its digital ARchive of Emperor Norton in the Arts (ARENA) with 40-some images — including an intriguing illustration featuring Emperor Norton that appeared to be an early engraving created during the Emperor's lifetime.
The illustration appears in the 1964 book The Forgotten Characters of San Francisco. But, apart from a credit to Robert Grannis Cowan — the son of Robert Ernest Cowan (1862–1942), whose title essay anchors the book, and also apparently (the younger Cowan) the private owner of the illustration who gave permission for it to be reproduced — the book provides no details about the artist, original source, or provenance of the illustration.
For the last nine years, this has been the extent of our knowledge about this work.
A few weeks ago, seeking intelligence about an elusive cabinet card of Emperor Norton, I requested from the Society of California Pioneers some catalog information about the Emperor-related items in the organization’s collection.
Included in the information the Society sent to me was an unbidden clue about the enigmatic illustration — a clue that has enabled me to solve the mystery and, in the process, crack a window into the the elusive history of one of San Francisco’s most influential early engravers and one of the city’s earliest satirical magazines.
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For those attuned to the story of Joshua Norton’s December 1852 attempt to corner the San Francisco rice market, a Weimar-era song with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and music by Hanns Eisler should harbor clear echoes.
The song, “Supply and Demand,” appears in Brecht’s play The Measures Taken (or The Decision) that first was performed in Berlin in December 1930.
The song is voiced by the character of the Trader, who opens the song with a meditation on his amoral effort to turn a profit on…rice.
This look at “Supply and Demand” includes audio and video of four recordings and performances of the song between 1965 and 2022.
Also included: A rare c.1920 advertising photograph showing Brecht with other key figures of Weimar popular culture.
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In 1984, Malcolm E. Barker published his little book, Bummer and Lazarus: San Francisco’s Famous Dogs, about the free-range canine friends and ratters of the early 1860s who were so beloved that the city’s Board of Supervisors exempted them from its severe dog-culling policy — and who subsequently were immortalized in cartoons of this period by Edward Jump and others.
The book includes Barker’s finding — since widely accepted — that there is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the persistent, wishful claim that Bummer and Lazarus were Emperor Norton’s dogs — rather, that the association between the Emperor and the dogs is just another of the many later apocryphal legends attaching to the Emp.
Sometime in the 13-year period between the publication of Barker’s book and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s death in 1997, Caen praised the book as “a wonderful addition to the shelf of Sanfriscana.”
But, for some four decades in the mid 20th century, Caen was among those who quietly but persistently gave oxygen to the urban myth that Emperor Norton owned Bummer and Lazarus.
Documented here are six examples from 1948 to 1985.
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In the mid to late 1870s, the Bradley & Rulofson studio created one of the seven photo-portraits of Emperor Norton the studio is known to have taken of the Emperor during his reign. The seated Emperor is holding his favorite walking stick, and his Chinese umbrella is propped against the chair.
The best-known version of this photograph appeared in a book published in 1964. The photo appears very dark — which adds to the mood but also obscures many details.
Here, we present a rarely seen brighter, more balanced — and more revealing — version of the photo that appeared in 1961.
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