Don Horter’s Library

Collected notes from the Don Horter Rabbit Hole.

One day I was looking for a copy of H. C. Cutcliffe’s The Art of Trout Fishing on Rapid Streams and found a copy on the Internet Archive. As I scrolled threw, I noticed a cool book plate:

I admired it for a moment, then dug into the book.

Later, I wondered what other classic books on trout fishing might be available at the Internet Archive. I found a bunch, which is pretty cool. I saved five of them to a list to read later.

Then I noticed a pattern. Three books in a row had the same Don Horter book plate.

You had my curiosity, now you have my attention.

Who is Don Horter? He clearly had a great library. What other gems did he track down that I don’t know about? How can I find more of his books?

Who is Don Horter?

I found this with an image of the book plate on Flickr:

Bookplate of Don Horter | Don Horter was a filmmaker and pho… | Flickr

Don Horter was a filmmaker and photographer who seemed to specialize in the Pacific Northwest. Among his films are The Columbia: River of Planned Destiny (1960), White Peril (1956), and Of Ships and Cargo (1960), a promotional film about the Portland Docks. He also did promotional photography and at least one film (Angler’s Paradise, 1959) for Katmailand Lodge in Katmai, Alaska.Bookplate pasted in “The genteel recreation: or, The pleasure of angling, a poem” by John Whitney (Published in London in 820]) Now in the University of California Library

www.flickr.com

Don Horter was a filmmaker and photographer who seemed to specialize in the Pacific Northwest. Among his films are The Columbia: River of Planned Destiny (1960), White Peril (1956), and Of Ships and Cargo (1960), a promotional film about the Portland Docks. He also did promotional photography and at least one film (Angler’s Paradise, 1959) for Katmailand Lodge in Katmai, Alaska.Bookplate pasted in “The genteel recreation: or, The pleasure of angling, a poem” by John Whitney (Published in London in 820]) Now in the University of California Library

Cool video he produced:

Don Horter’s Library

• Internet Archive
  • Searches:
    • https://archive.org/search?query=Don+Horter&sin=TXT
  • No consistently tagged metadata for Don Horter.
  • OCR mostly didn’t pick up the book plate. I found a few instances, but it didn’t occur in the original books I stumbled across.
  • All of the books I stumbled across were contributed by the University of California Libraries and had a stamp inside with Berkeley General Library.
• University of California Berkeley
  • Going off of the metadata at the Internet Archive that the books were contributed by the University of California and stamped with Berkeley, I searched their catalogue, first for a book I knew had the plate to see how it was tagged, then found the Trout Fishing group and filtered by books held by UC
    • https://search.library.berkeley.edu/discovery/search?query=sub,exact,Trout%20fishing,AND&tab=Default_UCLibrarySearch&search_scope=DN_and_CI&vid=01UCS_BER:UCB&facet=tlevel,include,available_p&mode=advanced&offset=0&came_from=pagination_3_1
    • Some of these that are digitized had the book plate!
• HathiTrust
  • I noticed that the books with the book plate were held by Northern Regional Library Facility and made available digitally by HathiTrust. The OCR seemed better for those digital ones because they do have Don Horter in the text.
  • So I searched HathiTrust for Don Horter.
    • https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?q1=%22Don+Horter%22&field1=ocr&a=srchls&ft=ft&lmt=ft
    • So many of these have the book plate!

What can I do with this?

• Download PDFs and look for the book plate
• Build a catalogue
• Make a special collection on the Internet Archive with Don Horter’s books
• Read and curate them
• Try to find more by looking for these subjects at UC Berkeley:

Another collection to look for:

Also UC Berkeley.

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006516015

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=J+E+Helmer&searchtype=all