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South Bend: South Bend Vocational School Press, 1920
What it is: The Story of South Bend, compiled and edited by Edythe J. Brown — the title page's own spelling of her name — and printed by the South Bend Vocational School Press in 1920. It is a school-made civic history: chapters on the press (chapter IX, "Growth of the Press"), the wars (chapter X), the library (chapter XIV), a chronology table running from the first newspaper of 1831 to the first daily of 1873, and an "Accurate Figures" table at the back. The Libraries leg read chapter XIV and the figures table first-hand from the Internet Archive's full text (pages 172–178): the 1872 dating of the library, the petition of 1880 and the tax law of 1883, the Castle's ground purchase of 1895, and the 1920 figures — some 52,000 volumes, circulation 232,689 to 15 November 1920 — stand in this history on Brown's pages.
Its standing, from this build's experience: Brown is the shelf's schoolteacher: near-contemporary, civic, careful with dates she could check against the record in front of her, and the best single short account of the city's institutions as they stood in 1920. Her figures are a snapshot, printed here as a snapshot. One mechanical warning stands from the Government leg: the machine text of her chapter XII garbles the 1840s charter passage, and a clean first-hand read of that chapter — from the page images, not the transcription — is owed before the charter sequence rests on her.
Sources:
- Title page of the 1920 volume (Internet Archive, item storyofsouthbend00browiala).