AUTHOR TRAVEL WRITER 1926 TRIP to CANADA SCRAPBOOK PHOTO ALBUM
Item #1323
The album, measuring 9 3/4” x 7 1/8” x 1 1/8” (landscape orientation), opens with the impressive ex-libris of one Charles Fish Howell, who with his wife, Joyce, boarded a cruise ship in New York in late July of 1926 and embarked on an extensive trip along the St. Lawrence, returning to NYC three weeks later, in mid-August.
Though the couple took around 35 photographs along the way, most of the album is filled with cutouts from brochures, ticket stubs, menus, postcards, small readymade photographs, maps and other ephemera.
Born in 1868, Mr. Howell was an experienced traveler, and published accounts of his exploits: the travel sequence “Around the Clock in Europe” had been published in 1912, and is reprinted in its entirety on the Project Gutenberg website gutenberg.org. This is no mere brochure but an extensive catalog, at 356 pages, of Western European capitals. His 259-page travelogue of Ireland, “An Irish Ramble”, would be published three years after this cruise, in 1929. In 1936, he would write a novel, “The Courier”, which interspersed romance with travel around the British Isles. Mr. Howell also seems to have contributed to a periodical about metallurgy.
The volume offered here has been professionally bound, with gold stamping along the spine: “Along the Way in Canada, 1926, Charles and Joyce Howell”. The album is remarkably well preserved and the binding still tight. 45 leaves/90 pages, plus fancier endpapers, with 160 individual things to look at on its pages, ending with the three-page typewritten tour itinerary.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the album is the hand-drawn map of the itinerary, in black and white ink on the gray page, incorporating New England, New York, Quebec and the Maritimes. On the reverse of that handmade title page, no less impressive but objectionable by modern standards, is a pen and ink illustration of a black man, a hotel porter in cap and uniform, with suitcases in each hand and another tucked under his arm, and a bright smile on his face.
After being collected during the voyage, the assortment of clippings and photos has been very cleverly laid out to provide a stop-by-stop account of the entire journey. Most entries are carefully if minimally annotated. 1000 Islands; Montreal; Tadousac; Trinity Bay; Murray Bay; Quebec City (where our heroes took many photos of the quaint streets, and stayed of course at the Chateau Frontenac); the Shrine of St. Anne De Beaupre (where we see the collection of abandoned crutches - described as “miracle trophies”); St. John, New Brunswick; and finally, Boston; before returning home to NYC.
All in all, an exceptional keepsake, of travel in comfort during the jazz age.
Price: $300.00