Recreational travel was one of the few luxuries Americans smiled upon 100 years ago. “Luxuries” are high-margin businesses that often spend more on marketing than production. It is no surprise then that travel literature was often lush and expensively colorful, even when color printing was too expensive for general advertising use.
This article surveys deluxe booklets and catalogs that promoted tourism before World War II, even at the depth of the Great Depression. This study is broken down into travelogues, destinations, travel organizers and student travel, railroad sponsors, cruise lines, material issued at sea, auto and bus travel, and miscellanea.
Before long-distance travel became convenient and widely affordable, many peoples' experiences of distant lands were obtained through travelogue lectures illustrated with magic-lantern slides. In the late 19th-century, the Ragan Illuminated Tours offered “delights of travel without its discomfort." The seventh season of these tours, 1886-87, included such varied itineraries as “Glimpses of Scotland,” “Ramblings in Spain and Morocco,” “the Rhine and Switzerland,” and “Through Old Mexico with a Camera.” A review reprinted from the Rocky Mountain News [Denver, Colo.] described an audience so dense that 500 people could not gain admission to the lecture. A generation later Burton Holmes dominated the travelogue lecture circuit. In his 18th season, 1910, colored slides and motion pictures illuminated his talks. The printed program offered a deluxe edition of Burton Holmes Travelogues, with 4,000 pages of text, 5,000 half tone etchings of photographs, and 36 "Full-Page Color Plates" as a subscription series costing "a few cents a day."
Destination ephemera advertised everything from one-day and historic festivals to seasonal travel and even emigration and settlement. The brochure displayed in one of the accompanying photos depicts when the Santa Barbara Flower Festival celebrated its fifth year. (Some now consider this festival the ancestor of Pasadena's Tournament of Roses.) The Oberammergau Passion Play was celebrating its 300th anniversary when American Express organized in 1934 "Amex Oberammergau Tours of Europe," which boasted one of the best cover designs of that era. The rear cover of "Panama Canal Hotels" (1927) exalts water sports. Florida used a handsome 64-page booklet in 1929 to encourage settlement. A great land boom there in the early ‘20s had come to an abrupt end thanks to hurricanes in 1925, which exploded the biggest real estate bubble America had ever seen.
Tour organizers published some of the richest booklets that turn up regularly on Ebay. Thos. Cook & Son dominated this field by the 1890s and remains a leading travel agency/banker. Its travelers checks once rivaled in ubiquity those issued by American Express. In the United Kingdom the company became synonymous with continental rail travel through Thos. Cook Wagon Lits. The picture of the book printed with this article, from 1928, has one of its nicer covers. The 1914-15 George E. Marsters catalog with its polar bear cover [familiar from recent Coke ads] is one of the gems of my collection. I especially liked its link to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. But the real surprises and joys awaiting collectors of travel ephemera are the delightful catalogs of Raymond & Whitcomb Co. of Boston. As a group they tower above other travel offerings. I would have liked to show a dozen great covers just as good as those pictured; examples include covers detailing Europe in 1926 and Round Africa and West Indies cruises, both in 1928.
As an art historian I am intrigued by the subcategory of tours organized for students or specifically for art lovers. The Students Travel Club of New York was the primary provider of collegiate tours. The longest tour offered in the pitured catalog was 60 days and cost $695; this tour happened to be organized by Newcomb College, the female division of Tulane University already well-known for its Art Nouveau pottery. The shortest tour was 24 days and cost $345. The Art Crafts Guild planned both adult and student art tours. Adult tour B5, with "native couriers; intelligent guides," promised to escort travelers around the world in 163 days. Unfortunately, no costs are given. Collegiate tours in 1927 ranged in length from 23 to 109 days and cost from $260 to $2,200.
Railroads were fat and happy at the turn of the 20th century. The New York Central, Vanderbilt's road, controlled New York when it issued in 1905 the issue of its monthly magazine Four-Track News entitled “The Summer Boarder.” Few remember that anyone with means once fled cities come hot weather because they became sweltering, stinking plague zones. This piece describes hundreds of getaways, most as close as the Catskill and Adirondack mountains but others as distant as Newfoundland and even Honolulu.
A fascinating booklet from the Burlington lists, describes, and illustrates photographically numerous dude ranches, a few being summer camps for boys or girls. Alaska, America's last frontier, spawned many beautiful publications, such as the one from the Canadian National railway system.
Cruise-line literature tended to be richer still. Although many catalogs have artistically significant and beautiful covers, few can touch the example issued in 1925 for Canadian Pacific's round-the-world cruises. Its heavy paper covers are deeply embossed. Interior pages look aged and grained; all illustrations are colorful drawings, many full-page. This book deserves to be reproduced in facsimile. By contrast, United Fruit, which controlled Central America then, used small, modest booklets to recruit passengers for what it called its Great White Fleet [a name earlier bestowed on a fleet that the U. S. Navy sent on an around-the-world "goodwill" tour.] Imagine now titling a booklet, as it did, "Following the Conquerors through the Caribbean." More modest and calmer cruises could be taken on "The Tideless Seas of North America" offered by a division of Canada Steamship Lines. Truly cheap cruises could be had through Tramp Trips Inc. of New York. Its customers could choose among cruise ships, cargo ships, and freighters. A 100-day South and East Africa trip by freighter cost $558.
Quite a few beautiful publications were issued at sea. Better-grade ships issued passenger lists, daily menus, programs for entertainments, newspapers, and miscellaneous ephemera. I particularly like the Guest List shown here issued aboard the S. S. President Hoover, of the Dollar Steamship Line, which sailed from San Francisco on September 26, 1937. It lists the passengers by destination, beginning with those going around the world, with others disembarking in places like Honolulu, Yokahama, and Manila. Japanese-ship ephemera is common, such as a program for a "concert & entertainment" aboard the S. S. Taiyo Maru on July 3, 1924.
Auto travel literature is more diverse but less lavish than other categories because it was often produced cheaply by small, independent businesses. An exception is "Tour Europe in Your Own Car," which although it looks like a booklet actually unfolds into a huge "Automobile Road Map of Western Europe." Its corporate parentage explains its lavishness, being issued in 1927 by the International Mercantile Marine Co. on behalf of the White Star, Red Star, Atlantic Transport, and Leyland lines. One had to transport one's car by ship, of course, to drive it in Europe. "Motor to Canada" owed its richness to Canadian Pacific sponsorship. This booklet directed motorists to hotels owned by the railroad. Carless Americans could visit many of the spectacles of "This Amazing America" aboard the buses of Greyhound Lines, already the leading interstate bus company.
Travelers by any mode in 1933 would find hotels in all price ranges conveniently listed in the "Travelers Hotel Guide," the "Official Directory of the National Hotel Protective Association." The most expensive hotels listed, at $9 a night, were the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and the Emerald Lake Chalet, in Field, British Columbia. (By contrast, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York was $6.) Hotels in resorts like Banff and Coronado Beach tended to be around double the average cost of a good hotel, such as the Palmer House in Chicago at $4, possibly because on the American Plan some meals were included. The actual sponsor of their booklet was the Hotel Credit Letter Company of New York. The letters it issued authorized "hotels in the United States and Canada to cash voucher-drafts, firm checks and personal checks." We forget now the fiscal/logistical difficulties travelers faced before the appearance of the first general credit cards, Am Ex purple, Diners Club, and Carte Blanche, just over half a century ago.
The publications mentioned and depicted with this article were all were acquired via Ebay within the past 10 years. None cost more than $20, and most were less than $10. Some were derisively cheap. It is a fun field for any level of collector to enter. In just the past month I have picked up an additional fine Raymond Whitcomb and a superb Students Travel Club catalog for around $10 each. So can you.