“Florida . . . and the Sunny South,” reads the front cover, but the real title of this booklet is on the back cover: Tropical Trips. The Atlantic Coast Line published an annual booklet of that name at least since 1904, which is the date on a similar booklet that is the University of Central Florida library.

Click image to download a 28.7-MB PDF of this 32-page booklet.

The 1904 booklet is only 20 pages long (and unfortunately two of them are missing from the UCF PDF), but it follows the same basic formula as this one from 1948: first is a description of major cities that people could visit in the sunny South followed by a list of hotels “along the Atlantic Coast Line.” The 1904 booklet gives the capacity of each hotel, the name of its manager, and daily and weekly rates; the 1948 edition has number of rooms and manager but nothing about rates.

The 1948 edition also has a full page listing golf courses “along the Atlantic Coast Line.” More than half of the listed courses are in Florida, but there are also several in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama, plus four in Cuba and one in the Bahamas. The list includes the number of holes, par, and yards for each course.

The city listings in the 1948 edition also includes more pages of more cities per page. In fact, it is almost an along-the-way booklet except that the cities are listed in alphabetical order rather than geographic order. With brief descriptions of more than 100 different cities, the number must have been overwhelming (and thus not very useful) to first-time travelers to Florida or other parts of the South.