On Howard Street, in the middle of San Francisco’s frenetic tech hub, Mark E. Sackett steps into his store which looks as though it was snatched from the 1850s and plunked down into a busy modern neighborhood.
Inside the building — which incidentally was built in the 20s to hold the presses for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner — sits Sackett’s life-long collection of printed materials, from tobacco tins to seed packets, to an original 1850 press built in San Francisco.
He boasts it’s the largest antique advertising and printed matter store in the world.
And don’t even get Sackett started on the cabinets. His idea was to get a couple old ones and make the place look like an 1850s country store.
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“Then I just went a little bit nuts,” Sackett admitted. “There’s 138 cabinets now.”
Visitors stepping into the store, named The Box SF, are immediately transported back into some other long ago era. Vintage French liquor posters hang from the walls; behind the long wooden antique counter are rows of boxes holding everything from vintage broom labels to tobacco and chocolate labels. Sackett estimates there are 15 million items in his collection which he began amassing when he was 12 years old.
“I grew up in Kansas City,” Sackett said. “I would dumpster dive for empty beer cans and liquor bottles.”
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The world of antiquities Sackett collected and presents is something of a time machine, might trick visitors into thinking they’ve just stepped into a museum. Sackett is quick to point out it’s a store. Everything is for sale.
“We’re not a museum, but we look like one,” said Sackett who’s a professional graphic designer. “For me it’s about the preservation for this history and my intense love of graphic design and typography.”
In the SoMa neighborhood thick with tech workers and their industry, Sackett’s collections of vintage stuff is even more of a paradox.
“Not a single thing in this room of almost four-thousand feet was drawn on a computer,” he said. “It was all hand done.”
Sackett grabbed a bowl holding his collection of pogs. Those are the decorative cardboard caps that once fit in the top of milk bottles to advertise their makers. He held up an antique box of mens’ underwear, with an ornate cover that looked like a piece of high art created to advertise a benign piece of merchandise.
“That’s not how your underwear comes today I’ll guarantee you,” Sackett said admiring the cover.
He set the box back on its shelf in an 1888 pharmacy cabinet which he bought and had shipped from Texas. The shelves of the cabinet were divided into sections including a grouping of vintage games and Sackett’s matchbox car collection from his childhood.
“I call it my castle,” Sackett said, surveying the room, of which every inch was covered in his collections.
Outside the door of his shop, is something less than a paradise. He’s been jumped twice on the sidewalk outside his business, resulting in a broken foot which was re-injured in another incident last week. The business is still trying to recover from COVID, which devastated sales. Sackett painted the legs of the Wicked Witch of the West protruding from the front steps to illustrate that COVID crushed his business.
He’s also in a deep hole from the SBA loan he took out during the pandemic, and is relying on rentals of his upper floors for parties and gatherings.
“We’re still hanging on, we’re doing our best,” Sackett said. “But the business has not come back.”
Sackett noted most first-time visitors are stunned after passing through the plain gray front door, and finding a deep past that seems more a fantasy than a store. That theme seems to match his inventory of ephemera — which Sackett explains is something printed for a purpose, had a short life and was intended to be thrown away.
“No, nothing should be here,” he said. “Almost everything here should have been destroyed.”
In that sense, Sackett’s store — and his stuff — are all survivors — thriving well beyond their expected shelf life. He’s hoping the holidays will bring back the shoppers to venture into his strange utopia of nostalgia.
“I’m not a hoarder, I’m a collector,” he insists with a grin. “But unfortunately I have a lot of things.”
