If the San Francisco Eats exhibit at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library has whetted your appetite for more than food, do yourself an instructive favor and spend a few minutes poking around the California Ephemera Project, a fascinating, searchable stockpile of all things inventively printed and inadvertently collectible from the city’s archives since roughly 1850.

To wit: just a cursory tour of the images displayed on the front page offers a colorful (often quite literally) look at how San Francisco’s history has mirrored and refracted that of the nation. See the program from an evening of “Comic Negro Extravaganzas” at the Alhambra Theater; compare Dan White’s sideburns in a campaign flyer with Josh Brolin’s sideburns in Milk; marvel at the fact that the Goodenough Horseshoeing Society of California was an actual thing, not a hipster prog-rock band. And that’s just the first page.