Two new books of particular interest to San Franciscans are presented by their authors.

J.K. Dineen
presents his new book,
High Spirits: The Legacy Bars of San Francisco

Community, heritage, architecture—oh yes, and stiff pours: these are the hallmarks of San Francisco’s Legacy Bars. High Spirits leads readers on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood pub crawl in search of the city’s most remarkable nightspots. Atmospheric photographs accompany descriptions of each bar’s colorful history, unique architectural features, idiosyncratic owners, and quirky clientele. As we dip into one barroom after another, we see that these establishments function as unofficial cultural centers, offering kinship and continuity amid an ever-changing city; indeed, all of the bars shown are at least forty years old and sites of significant historic or cultural value as deemed by San Francisco Heritage. Whether we are following in the footsteps of Beat writers in North Beach’s Vesuvio Café, tossing peanut shells on the floor of The Homestead in the Mission, or selecting jukebox songs (three for a quarter) at the Silver Crest Donut Shop in Bayview, High Spirits welcomes us as regulars at every spot, showing off the conviviality that makes San Francisco one of the great saloon towns.

John King presents
Cityscapes 2: Reading the Architecture of San Francisco

The follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist John King’s Cityscapes, this volume is part pocket guide, part history, and part architectural primer, and is the companion piece to urban design critic John King’s Cityscapes: San Francisco and Its Buildings contains all of the wit and wonder of the first installment. In epigrammatic prose and with detailed full-color photographs, King highlights fifty structures that tell the story of San Francisco through architecture. Included are emblematic buildings such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, and the Palace of Fine Arts; but King pays just as close attention to less celebrated structures that embody the politics, architectural fads, and cultural values of the eras in which they were conceived. A fresh take on the familiar, Cityscapes 2shows us how to read the structures around us as signposts and translations for the story of a multilayered and ever-changing city,