Editing Hubert Howe Bancroft (section)

==Move to California==
In March 1852, Bancroft was provided with an inventory of books to sell and was sent to the booming [[California]] city of [[San Francisco]] to set up a West Coast regional office of the firm.<ref name=MWA /> Bancroft was successful in building his company, entering the world of publishing in the process.<ref name=MWA /> He also became a serious collector of books, building a collection numbering into the tens of thousands of volumes.<ref name=MWA />

In 1868, he resigned from his business in favor of his brother, A.L. Bancroft.  He had accumulated a great library of historical material and abandoned business to devote himself entirely to writing and publishing history.<ref name="appletons">{{Cite Appletons'|wstitle=Bancroft, Hubert Howe|year=1900}}</ref>

Bancroft's library consisted of books, maps, and printed and manuscript documents, including a large number of narratives dictated to Bancroft or his assistants by pioneers, settlers, and statesmen. The indexing of the vast collection employed six persons for ten years. The library was moved in 1881 to a fireproof building and, in 1900, numbered about 45,000 volumes.<ref name="appletons"/>

He developed a plan to publish a history in 39 volumes of the entire Pacific coast region of North America, from Central America to Alaska. He employed writers and wrote some of the material himself, though he credited only himself as an author. In 1886, the publishing establishment of A.L. Bancroft & Company burned, and the sheets of seven volumes of the history he had written were destroyed.<ref name="appletons"/>