The Box SF is a surprising place. It has a table made of 340-year-old village gate doors from China’s Shandong province, 11 functioning printing presses and an archive of 15 million individual items, all nestled into the former printing plant of The San Francisco Examiner at 1069 Howard St. in SoMa.
“It’s one of the most unusual spaces I’ve ever seen and that San Francisco will ever have,” said frequent customer Zach Shpak, a children’s nurse in Oakland, who began shopping at The Box SF five years ago. “I have zero confidence that anything like it will ever exist again.”
Of the millions of items for sale at the cavernous ground floor of The Box SF — a space that reads more museum than store — not one was made on a computer, except for the owner’s and employees’ business cards.
Owner Mark Sackett claims his collection is the largest antique advertising and ephemera store in the world, and looking around, it’s hard to doubt him. The material dates from around 1600 to the 1980s, with 85 countries represented and prices ranging from 25 cents to north of $8,000. The space is lined with tall cabinets and fronted by shorter glass cabinets; it’s organized, immaculate and entirely devoid of any jumble or must of some antique stores.
Yet perhaps what’s most unusual about The Box SF is that so few San Franciscans seem to know about it despite the business having a robust event calendar, three Instagram accounts and multiple rentable spaces.
“There was no sandwich board, no mural, no nothing. It was entirely dumb luck I found him.” Shpak said. “It’s like a speakeasy.”
Sackett, in fact, has a basement speakeasy, a custom space he built for private events. He also hosts weddings, business meetings, and corporate events on the building’s second story.
A graphic designer, art director, and filmmaker, Sackett bought the 15,000-square-foot SoMa building housing The Box SF 23 years ago. Back then, the ceilings were still yellowed from cigarette smoke and the floors an unattractive maple. He set about its transformation, refinishing those floors and fashioning the interior after an old country store, decorating nearly every inch of the place with his finds, including oversized light fixtures from what he called “the most famous gay bar in the world,” the Abbey in Los Angeles.
“I lusted after these for years,” Sackett said of the 600-pound fixtures. “They’re handblown glass, brass and the leaves are sheet copper with plaster, and they were all handmade.” He had to build custom rails for them in case of earthquakes.
Sackett began collecting when he was 12 years old. He and his brother liked to find empty beer bottles and cans, lining the shelves of their parents’ basement in Kansas City with them. Soon, with the help of his parents, he joined the Beer Can Collectors of America and received a list of all the breweries in the country. He decided to write to every one of them, asking for their beer labels.
“Two months later I’d get these 9x12 envelopes with beautiful letterhead signed by the brewmaster, saying, ‘Thank you for your interest in our product. We know you're too young to drink, but here's two of each of our labels.’ Well, now I have two and a half million beer labels,” he said. His love of labels led him to his career in graphic design, working on projects for brands like Blue Diamond almonds and Levi’s.
Despite its under-the-radar status — the day we talked Sackett was handing out Halloween candy to neighbors who didn’t know of his business’s existence — The Box SF has found its fans like Shpak and Paula Fujiwara, a physician who specializes in international medicine. Though she lives in San Francisco, she learned about The Box SF when she was in London at an ephemera event.
“Every time you go in there, it’s a treasure hunt,” Fujiwara said. Sackett also has a large following among Chinese customers who have found him thanks to RedNote, an app popular in China for finding cool things to do since Instagram is blocked.
When Sackett talks about the act of collecting, his eyes go hazy. He speaks in terms of love and courtship, sounding less like a businessman and more like a moony lover. He likes to use the word “lust,” as when he describes his desire for biscuit boxes designed by Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. (Sackett wrote his college thesis on American illustrator Maxfield Parrish, who was influenced by Mucha, and there’s an entire case in the store dedicated to Art Nouveau).
Ephemera is, by definition, temporary. Its destination is usually the dustbin. Yet at The Box SF, ephemera is collected, harvested, and worshipped. As each treasured item finds its new home, it becomes eternal.
Collecting ephemera also allows Sackett to appreciate the everyday in a completely new way. “We have all these early Quaker Oats packages but we also have Quaker Oats advertising,” Sackett said. “It’s fun to see how these brands have evolved over the years. And Quaker Oats is still around. I had it last week for breakfast.”
