Printing blocks reveal California's advertising history

We antique and art dealers thrive on a network of kind souls called pickers. These people delve into the nooks and crannies that those of us with shops could never find and are content to sell to us without wringing every last dollar out of the equation.

We could not exist without them.

A wonderful picker friend of mine found a bunch of old printing blocks in an estate sale near Julian somewhere. He kept a few choice ones for himself and I bought the rest for a very reasonable sum.

My friend Dixon Fish is a master printmaker. I asked him to pull some prints from the blocks so I could see what...