Rare Books
Image not available
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Visual Materials
A volume of photographs accompanied by a typescript travel narrative by Thomas Recknagel, a Cornell University undergraduate, documenting his travels by automobile and railroad in the summer of 1938. The bound volume is titled "Western Journey" and begins with snapshots taken during a train trip from Ithaca, New York, through Chicago, to San Francisco, where Recknagel met his parents and family friends to travel by car. They headed north through Oregon to British Columbia, where their trip included a cricket match in Vancouver; Victoria; a boat trip around the Gulf Islands; and a visit to the University of British Columbia, where Arthur Recknagel had taken a visiting lecturer position. The group took a return train trip through the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes, and across Canada to Port McNicoll, Ontario. There are two appendices of photographs from Recknagel's parents' trip in the beginning of the year, with several snapshots of Yosemite. The back of the volume also has 20 commercial photographs (3.5 x 5-inches) of Vancouver and the Fraser River area in British Columbia. Notable in the album are a series of photographs and narrative of the rescue of a man who had attempted suicide by jumping into the sea in San Francisco.
photCL 660