428 - Group of American Travel Literature, View Albums and Booklets, Early 20th C.

Group of American Travel Literature, View Albums and Booklets, Early 20th C. Group of view albums, picture booklets and paper-bound publications on North America and Mexico. Included among others are: From San Francisco along the line of the Western Pacific Railway to Salt Lake City, Feather River Canon Route, oblong format with a folding route map and mounted colour plates on dark green board; American Indians. First Families of the Southwest, edited by J. F. Huckel for the Fred Harvey Indian Department, with full-page colour plates after paintings by J. Allen St. John; a cord-bound album San Francisco with mounted black and white plates; albums on Los Angeles with views of the Mount Lowe Railway, on Yosemite National Park and on Grand Canyon National Park in photogravure; Niagara Falls Canada, including Niagara Glen and Queenston Heights; The Cathedral of Commerce on the Woolworth Building in New York with views from the observation gallery; Tourists' Guide to New Orleans; Universal Indian Sign Language by William Tomkins with full-page drawn plates of the hand signs; Indian Beadwork and Basketry Designs of the Mission Indians published by the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Vocabulario Totonaco by Celestino Patiño. Bindings in board, cloth and paper wrappers, some with colour illustration. Condition commensurate with age, partly with losses, signs of age. View albums and souvenir booklets were standard equipment for long-distance travel from the late 19th century into the interwar years; they were bought at the destination and took the place of the traveller's own photography. Part of the group goes back to the publicity departments of the American railway companies, which advertised their routes with lavishly illustrated booklets; the Fred Harvey Indian Department supplied the station hotels along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the same way. The volume on Indian Sign Language stands in the tradition of the records of the sign language of the Plains peoples, which served in the 19th century as a supra-regional means of communication between language groups and was systematically documented from the 1880s onwards. The publications of the American Museum of Natural History on beadwork and basketry were intended as pattern booklets for designers.