Paul Elder and Company

William Doxey was born in England in 1844 and came to America in his twenties. His bookstore, fashionably located on Market Street under the Palace Hotel, was a center of the San Francisco literary scene in the mid-1890's. Today Doxey is best known as the publisher of the famous literary magazine The Lark.

In 1892 Doxey hired a young man named Paul Elder as a clerk. Elder stayed on for six years, learning the book trade. By 1897 he felt secure enough to strike out on his own.

Doxey went bankrupt in 1900, and his shop closed. He moved to New York and published a few more books there, but that business failed as well. In 1909 he moved to Chicago, and died 27 November 1916, age 72.

Window display about Robert Louis Stevenson
at Doxey's bookstore, shortly after
Stevenson's death in 1894.