We’ve previously seen a 1922 Burlington booklet about Colorado and Utah that proclaimed the two states were “America’s Playground for Americans.” This one, which says the same thing, is from 1926. The two share some of the same black-and-white photos, but the text is quite different.
Click image to download a 14.8-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.
Both of them are also similar to some Northern Pacific booklet’s we’ve seen, including this 1915 booklet about Pacific Coast Attractions. For both the NP and Burlington booklets, the front cover is half photo, half text, all in a somewhat ornate frame. What I would call the main cover (shown above) is on the back, and is split into two in case the booklet is folded in half.
All three booklets are marked “Poole Bros. Chicago” on the inside back cover. Poole Brothers was a printing house founded in 1870 that served “practically every railroad in the country.” George Poole, who founded and led the company, was born in 1843 and died in 1918. His son probably continued operating the company and his grandson, George Poole III (1907-1990), was a noted collector of early prints and manuscripts. I can’t find any indication of when the company went out of business, but the most recent railroad publication I can find printed by Poole Brothers is this Union Pacific Yellowstone booklet that is dated April 1955.
The NP and Burlington booklets might be similar because the two railroads were financially related. Or they might be similar because they were both published by the same printer. This raises the question of how much control printing companies such as Poole Brothers and Rand McNally (which was co-founded by George Poole before he started his own printing house) had over the design of railroad advertising.
Did the railroads give the printers a budget and let them do all the design work? Or did the railroads do all the design work while the printer only did the printing? Or was it somewhere in between? It is possible that no one alive knows the answer to these questions, but if someone does, I’d appreciate hearing from you.