The Handbook of Return: A Paper Object Made to Be Replaced
A paper object becomes an heirloom much as a chair does: through use, preservation, and the evidence it retains. A student handbook from Los Angeles High School, printed in 1918 to be used for a single year and then replaced, has instead been kept for more than a century.
Its cover is plain and its typography unadorned. On the title page, in pencil, is an inscription: the name Bertha and the words "class room 410." That is the first evidence the object offers. It records not who she became, which the handbook does not tell us, but that the book belonged to a student who carried it and marked it as her own.
Handbook of the Los Angeles High School, 1918. The printed cover carries the school seal, "Founded 1873"; a student's penciled marks show through below it.
Can a paper object be an heirloom?
An heirloom is not defined by its material. It is defined by use, and by the decision to keep. Walnut and velvet qualify, and so does paper that was handled daily and never discarded. The 1918 handbook was published by the Blue and White Weekly, the school's student paper, and names Reg. Vaughan as its editor and business manager. The book set the year in order: schedules, subjects, rules of conduct, and expectations. It was designed to be replaced the following September. This copy was not.
What lifts it above a timetable is what it was built to do. The handbook did not simply describe the school. It instructed the student, day by day, in how to belong to it.
The title page, published by the student paper, the Blue and White Weekly. Penciled across the top: "Bertha, class room 410, Los Angeles High School.
A City, and a School, at War
The handbook records a city in transformation and a school at war. Los Angeles in 1918 was doubling and redoubling: a town of roughly a hundred thousand in 1900 was climbing toward the million it would pass by 1930. Oil derricks stood along the ridgelines, and one of the world's largest electric railways carried students and workers out along boulevards still being laid. It was a place inventing itself faster than it could be mapped.
That autumn, the influenza pandemic reached the city. The first civilian cases were reported in September, and on October 11 the mayor declared a public emergency and closed the schools. For a season, the very routines the handbook laid out were suspended. A letter Bertha wrote the following June records that Los Angeles High School graduated its winter and summer classes together, the winter class having been unable to graduate "on account of the flu last year," confirming that the interruption reached past the handbook's single school year.
Los Angeles High School stood near the center of this. Founded in 1873, the oldest public high school in the city, it had moved only the year before to a new campus on Olympic Boulevard, where close to two thousand students gathered each morning. The handbook was issued within that setting: a large, still-growing school in a large, still-growing city, printed to guide a single year inside both.
Its pages carry more than academics. Students trained in first aid and nursing. A Red Cross auxiliary was organized within the school. Nineteen French orphans were adopted through coordinated fundraising, and the contributions were counted in the handbook itself, down to 102 scarves and 152 sweaters. The motto over the stage read: "Obedience to Law, Mastery of Self, Respect for Others, Joy in Service, These Constitute Life." The handbook functioned as instruction rather than sentiment. It shaped behavior and structured responsibility. It taught students how to return each day into civic life.
Page three of the 1918 handbook: the motto over the stage, above a published record of the school's wartime service, including 102 scarves, 152 sweaters, and nineteen adopted French war orphans.
Academic requirements were set out with the same clarity. Thirty-two credits were required to graduate. English, American history, mathematics, science, and drawing formed the core; physical training, hygiene, and music were compulsory; upper grades could add bookkeeping, stenography, commercial law, foreign languages, or nursing. The handbook records a library of 11,000 volumes, described in its pages as the largest maintained by any high school in California. It was open daily and actively used. Even the finances were published in full, from alumni funds to chemistry supplies and bleacher repairs. Read closely, the handbook records far more than a school year.
Made to Be Replaced
The young woman in the striped dress is Bertha, the handbook's owner. Photographed by the Mitchell studio in Los Angeles, she is dressed for a portrait rather than a school day, a parasol angled across her shoulder. The portrait holds a moment of poise and readiness, and nothing is asked of the girl beyond standing still.
Bertha, the handbook's owner, photographed by the Mitchell studio, 619½ South Broadway, Los Angeles.
The handbook was made to be replaced, and that is precisely why its survival carries weight. What endures is rarely what was built to last. More often it is what was handled often enough to keep the record of use. A penciled name on a title page marks ownership the way a worn armrest marks a returning hand: both are evidence that one person came back to the same object, morning after morning, until the object began to hold the shape of the returning.
Each September, schedules resume and interiors settle back into use. The object was built for that rhythm of return, and it outlasted the single year it was meant to guide and the routines it once organized. It survived because Bertha carried it, and because across a century it was kept, again and again, rather than thrown away.
Object in this Journal
The Handbook of the Los Angeles High School, 1918, published by the Blue and White Weekly. A paper-bound student handbook penciled with the name Bertha, kept for more than a century.
This object remains in the Acanthus archive. Its companion in the Collection is a place where papers such as these were once kept and read: The Tigrane Compendium, an antique tiger oak fall-front secretary.
See the collection's antique writing desks and secretaries.
Related reading
Menus at Sea: Tenyo Maru, 1918 - another 1918 paper object that outlived the single day it was printed for.
Frances Josephine Hadley and the Shape of a Life - a life read from a Los Angeles commencement program.
Thoughtfully Collected. Quietly Shared.
