For Christmas I Got You a Copy of Guy Cahoon's 1933 Sketches of Dallas. Only 300 Ever Made.

A long while back I'd promised to share with the Friends of Unfair Park a few images from Guy F. Cahoon's Sketches of Dallas, a very limited-run book published by the locally based Authors Press in 1933. I'd found it at Half-Price, but alas, I never got 'round to it. So instead I've gone ahead and scanned the entirety of the slim, hardcover tome of which there were only 300 copies ever made. As you'll see, it was printed on behalf of First National Bank of Dallas -- as Christmas gifts, I was recently told.

Cahoon was an illustrator and artist who counted among his acolytes painter Buck Schiwetz; he was best known for his ad work, as three years before he published Sketches of Dallas, Cahoon was responsible for yet another tome, the easier-to-find Commercial Art.  And as Doug Newby points out, he also designed "perhaps the most charming home in Northern Hills." But Sketches remains his Important Work -- a history of the city penned when it was still a young town, written almost as though it's the stuff of myth: "It was sunset of a late Indian Summer day in 1841. Mesquite trees and buffalo grass threw their slim, fantastic shadows along the prairie ..."

And then there are the sketches -- some of buildings that remain (including my favorite, the Federal Reserve Bank building); many of torn-down memories whose absences haunts downtown to this day. It's on the other side. I hope you dig it.

Sketches of Dallas