The Handbook of Return
On memory, ritual, and renewal
Each September carries the sense of return. Students gather, households resume rhythm, and rituals of learning and belonging take their place once more. For more than a century, handbooks, desks, and heirlooms have quietly marked these transitions.
Not all heirlooms are carved from walnut or upholstered in velvet. Some heirlooms are not furniture at all, but small booklets, like a student handbook carried in a satchel in 1918 and preserved for over a century.
That year, as the world staggered through war and influenza, Los Angeles was a city in transformation. Streetcars traced their way down new boulevards, oil fields dotted the horizon, and neighborhoods swelled with families seeking opportunity. Los Angeles High School, the city’s oldest, had just moved into its imposing “Bee Hive” campus in 1917, where thousands of students gathered each morning. Amid this shifting landscape, a young student, my grandmother’s aunt, received a modest handbook.
She penciled her name on its opening page, claiming it as her own. Its brown cover was plain, its typography unadorned, but within she found order: schedules, subjects of study, rules of conduct, and reminders of a world beyond the classroom walls.
Inside its pages, the 1918 handbook revealed more than timetables. It was a record of a city at war. Students were trained in first aid and nursing, organized Red Cross auxiliaries, and contributed scarves, sweaters, books, and magazines to soldiers abroad. They adopted nineteen French orphans, raising funds through doll sales, medals, and correspondence. Mottoes were posted above the stage: “Obedience to Law, Mastery of Self, Respect for Others, Joy in Service, These Constitute Life.” The handbook was not only a guide to study, but a charter for civic duty. Just as a carved chair or restored table can embody more than its form, this slim booklet carried the weight of an entire generation’s duties and hopes.
The handbook also detailed the academic expectations of its time. Thirty-two credits were required for graduation, with courses in English, American history, mathematics, science, and drawing, alongside physical training, hygiene, and music. Upper grade students might add bookkeeping, stenography, commercial law, foreign languages, or nursing. The library, boasting 11,000 volumes and the largest of any high school in California, was staffed by certified librarians, open from morning to late afternoon, and freely used for study. Even the school’s finances were carefully published, listing everything from alumni funds and chemistry supplies to bleacher repairs and “Beet Specials.”
A portrait from the same year captures her with youthful poise, smiling, dressed in stripes, her parasol angled across her shoulders. It is the image of a girl preparing to step into the future while the world around her was shifting.
Over a century later, the handbook survives. Its worn pages, once carried daily by a girl navigating adolescence in wartime Los Angeles, have outlasted the reinventions of the city itself. What was once ephemeral, a student aid for a single year, is now an heirloom. It reminds us that even the most ordinary objects can carry continuity, quietly guiding us back into belonging.
And so it is today. Summer has ended, schools have begun again, and households everywhere return to rhythm. In 1918, a handbook outlined duty, study, and service. In 2025, the season still calls us back to schedules, responsibilities, and rituals that orient us. The particulars may change, but the impulse is the same: to begin again, not as novelty, but as continuity.
Objects such as these, the handbook from 1918 and the restored antiques we live with today, are reminders that design and material are never inert. They hold memory, structure, and the human need for renewal. They are vessels that quietly teach us how to return.
Every autumn has its handbook… Sometimes it is the rituals and interiors we re-enter each September, shaped by the antiques and heirlooms that anchor our spaces. Both speak of return. Both remind us that beginnings are less about invention than about inheritance, threads carried forward by the things we choose to preserve.
A Note from Acanthus Home
At Acanthus Home, we believe heirlooms endure not only in paper and photographs but also in the antique furniture that anchors our homes. Just as this 1918 Los Angeles High School handbook guided a generation, restored antique furniture can ground a household today. Each chair, table, or cabinet in our collection is carefully curated and refinished in Los Angeles to embody memory, craftsmanship, and continuity.
Our luxury antique collections are designed for interior designers, collectors, and aesthetes who seek more than décor. They are made for story-rich interiors where every piece has meaning. Explore our curated antiques and discover restored heirloom furniture, crafted in Los Angeles, that will anchor your interiors and shape your own rituals of return.
