Anonymous 10 min read

In the days of early San Francisco, a maiden meets a talking Fish who bids her step into his mouth, and so begins a strange fairy tale in verse of the Golden Gate's romantic past.

This anonymous 1850 book is a curious early California fairy tale told in verse. Quaint, whimsical, historically rare. Read it for a charming oddity of Gold Rush-era publishing, a fanciful storybook of fish-kings and enchantment set in the young city by the bay, an artifact of San Francisco's earliest literary days.

In its time

Published in 1850, during the 1850s, fairy tale and moral fantasy for a mass reading public; the sensation novel stirs.

Reading it

10 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).