“Send books!” A Polish veteran running California’s immigration office in San Francisco in the 1870s.

In the 1870s, at 302 Davis Street in San Francisco, the letterhead on Rudolf Korwin Piotrowski’s desk read “Office of the Commissioner of Immigration, State of California.” Piotrowski – a November Uprising veteran — used that office to do something wildly unglamorous: he kept writing to Józef Ignacy Kraszewski in Dresden with one stubborn request: “Send books!” The goal was a working Polish library for a small, scattered community on the Pacific coast, down to shipping rules like weight limits and open-ended packages after the Geneva postal changes.

Full essay (in Polish): “Send the books!” November insurrectionist at the California immigration office