The streets are empty, mostly. Even when small groups gather, they do so soundlessly. Men, standing at an awkward distance from each other, gazing toward an observer far removed in time.

The images, found in a rare old book, had nothing to do with an outbreak of disease. That’s a mindset we bring from our current, fearful moment of worldwide pandemic. To the contrary, “The Taber Photographic Album of Principal Business Houses, Residences and Persons” was originally produced in 1880 as a celebration and advertisement of San Francisco’s commercial vitality.

Seven additional copies of the book are known to exist, in slightly different versions. Three of those are located in the area, at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the California State Library in Sacramento and the San Francisco Public Library.

But a single copy is now being offered for sale by a dealer known as the 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop.

The album’s surreal encapsulation of what was then the largest, richest city in the American West owes much of its uneasy mood to the documentary technology of the day. “If someone moves, the picture will be spoilt,” the photographer might have said, so the men froze with the fear of ruining something the boss seemed to want just so.

The boss had paid good money to have the firm included in the project. Taber had become the most prominent photography firm west of the Mississippi after buying out — gallery, negatives, goodwill and all — the bankrupt photo practice of the great artist Carleton E. Watkins. Presumably to avoid the kind of financial mistakes Watkins made, Isaiah West Taber got his payments up front. In the colophon of the published album, Taber thanks the participating businesses for their “hearty cooperation and patronage in part defraying the great expense incurred.”

Those participants proudly dragged their goods into the sunlight, to make the most of the picture. The bookbinder fashioned a precarious display of blank volumes in his best tooled-leather covers, the pork packer surrounded himself with aproned butchers.

Taber himself had all the framed pictures in his “photographic parlor” turned to the camera. Most prominently displayed was his portrait of former President Ulysses S. Grant, a popular figure who had received a hero’s welcome in 1879 when he stayed for nearly a month in San Francisco after an extended world tour.

In a true sign that the city pictured is not some genteel European burg but a brawly, authentically American one, one corner building is topped by a pair of billboards, set at an angle, that announce in oversize letters: “GUNS. GUNS.”

Posterity was not much on the minds of the photographer and his customers. The book is less a conscious work of art than a fancy business directory — precursor to the Yellow Pages, which one day soon would index contact numbers for the newfangled telephone, patented four years earlier.

The album would receive, Taber announced, “a gratuitous circulation in the principal Hotels, Steamers, etc., on the Pacific Coast, Eastern States, and adjacent foreign countries.” Its purpose, clearly, was to help the sellers of the coffins and corsets, California sugar-cured hams and Levi Strauss riveted clothing, the rockaways, buggies, phaetons and wagons to reach potential buyers.

And yet, the book has an undeniable melancholy about it. The death represented by each shaded visage of the album is a matter of measured, unequivocal fact. Like the daily, metronomic accounting, now, of pandemic loss.

Its makers could not know an earthquake was due, in 25 years or so, to wipe away the 19th century city it pictured. That the world they knew would end, just as our onetime world ended in 2020.

“Heard melodies are sweet,” poet John Keats wrote in 1819, “but those unheard are sweeter.” The Grecian urn he contemplated put him in mind of eternal beauty.

The silent “Taber Photographic Album” of 60 years later communicates, instead, the honest virtues of industry, investment, work. Values easy to forget when the country is humming along, feeding and fattening enough of us to keep the societal lid on, but rapidly emerging as the anxiety of our age.

“The Taber Photographic Album of Principal Business Houses, Residences and Persons”: A rare item offered by the 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop, Stevenson, Md., at $185,000. 410-602-3002. www.19thshop.com

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