Wanderlust [caption title]

[Various locations in the American Southwest and West, 1923. About very good.. Two oblong folio photograph albums bound in brown pebbled leather, each titled in gilt on front cover, "WANDERLUST," containing a total of 266 full-page vernacular and professional photographs. First albums: [146] leaves, illustrated with 128 full-page landscape photographs, each around 6 x 8 inches or slightly larger, and occasional manuscript or hand-fashioned sectional title pages and maps. Second volume: [148] leaves, illustrated with 138 photographs and occasional manuscript or hand-fashioned sectional title pages. All contents mounted one per page to recto of each leaf. Spines perished, but holding strong, boards worn, scuffed, and soiled. Contents noticeably curled, with minor to moderate dust-soiling throughout. A studio photograph of a young man is laid-in to the first album, likely the compiler of the albums but sadly unidentified. An elaborately-produced pair of vernacular photograph albums documenting an epic cross-country train excursion in 1923 by a well-to-do but anonymous traveler from New York, comprised of over 260 full-page photographs. The photographs are a mixture of silver gelatin images, printing out paper prints, handcolored photographs, and a handful of cyanotypes. Most of the images appear to be taken by the traveler en route, but some images may have been bought along the way. The images largely picture the landscape or architecture seen along the way, with a healthy number of images showing the railroad and the railcars themselves, with many images taken at train depots. The occasional manuscript sectional title pages denote the regions of travel, as the compiler moved west to California and then eventually back east towards home.

The first album begins with a manuscript title leaf quoting the text of Gerald Gould's poem "Wanderlust," supplemented by two small drawings and two thumbnail photographs. A map on the second leaf traces the voyage from New York, down through the American South and Southwest to California and back to New York through Arizona, Colorado, and the Midwest. Thereafter, the album is comprised mostly of full-page photographs grouped together by location, with anywhere from a few to several images per section. The first section in the first album shows the first major stop on the trip -- Washington, D.C. and Mount Vernon; this section contains photographs of the Capitol, the Lincoln Monument, other D.C. buildings, and several on the grounds of George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. The album then includes sections featuring New Orleans (six photographs); the route between New Orleans and El Paso (five images, including the train depot at Langtry, Texas); El Paso (five shots featuring the city and street views); Juarez, Mexico (eight shots, mostly either street scenes or a bullfight); "Thru New Mexico and Arizona" (four images); The Apache Trail in Arizona (nineteen shots, mostly desert landscapes but with some buildings along the trail); and onward through the Carriso Gorge (seven photos) to California beginning at Coronado Beach (eight photographs). The remainder of the first album features California locations, namely San Diego (sixteen images, mostly missions); Pasadena (ten photos mostly featuring gardens); Catalina Island (eight shots of the island scenery or the bay); Los Angeles (eight views in Santa Monica, Venice, and Ocean Park); and ending with fourteen images featuring missions and other notable structures in Santa Barbara.

The second volume picks up the excursion in Del Monte, California, featuring fifteen scenes in Carmel by the Sea and Monterey. The photographic journey of California then continues to Santa Cruz and the Big Trees (five shots); San Francisco (eleven views around the city and in the Japanese gardens); Mt. Tamalpais (a dozen shots of elevated vistas, big trees, and forests); Yosemite National Park (twenty park views); Mariposa Big Trees (seven shots); and ends with the Glenwood Mission Inn in Riverside (twenty-two images of the hotel grounds and other local scenery and missions around Riverside). The remainder of the album features photographs from the Grand Canyon in Arizona (twenty-six images, mostly landscapes but with a few featuring Native American ceremonies) and Colorado Springs (twenty landscapes and other views of the city, surrounding desert, Pikes Peak, and so forth). Concerned mostly with scenery of the American South, Southwest, and West Coast, the compiler did not see fit to record photographs of the remainder of his trip back home to New York.

In addition to the information contained in the photographs here, the elaborate materiality (custom matching albums with matching gilt titles to the front board, handcrafted sectional title pages, the hand-drawn and traced map) and the nature of the organization of the albums (arranged in the order of travel from east to west and back east again) speaks volumes about the importance the compiler placed on the trip. Substantially documented western travel albums are growing rare in the market, and the present example is one of the most carefully-assembled examples we have ever seen. (Inventory #: 5280)