There is just enough trompe-l’œil in the cover painting on this booklet that it almost makes me dizzy to look at it. Like yesterday’s, this one is from the collection of Charles Medin, who was a staff artist for Illinois Central. However, he clearly didn’t paint the cover as it is signed A. Fitzpatrick. Although an Art Fitzpatrick worked for the auto industry after 1938, he was only 10 years old when this booklet came out and I can’t find any information about an artist by that name who was working in 1929.

Click image to download a 13.0-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.

The booklet’s frontispiece has a drawing signed Wm. Mark Young (1881-1946). Young was born in Alton, studied art at Washington University in St. Louis, and worked as a commercial artist, first in St. Louis, then Chicago, and also for a time in Cleveland. He was known as a muralist and also illustrated books.

Most of the pages of this booklet have an ornate red border with the words “New Orleans” in hand-drawn letters at the top. Though it covers the same subjects as yesterday’s booklet, the text and photographs seem to be completely new even if they are of the same subjects as the 1921 booklet.

While the Panama Canal rates two pages of text in the 1921 booklet, it is only mentioned twice in this one and then only to say that New Orleans is “the gateway to the Panama Canal” That’s a stretch, though the port did benefit from the canal. The booklet also notes that all three trains from Chicago to New Orleans, led by the Panama Limited, were all-steel in 1929.