Fifty years after putting William Robinson Leigh’s painting of the Grand Canyon on the cover of Titan of Chasms, the Santa Fe used it again (in a slightly different cropping) on the cover of this 28-page booklet. While Titan of Chasms was mainly essays, this booklet is mainly photos and graphics with a few words of text.
Click image to download a 9.0-MB PDF of this booklet.
Although the photographs inside are all black-and-white, many are tinted (not always successfully) in yellow, cyan, or brown. More successful are the graphics, mostly based on Native American art, such as Mimbres pottery designs, Hopi Kachina dolls, and ancient pictographs.
The photographs are not very good when they were tinted the way it was done in this booklet, but they are better than some of the murky black and white photos in previous booklets. In the prewar days, many people visiting the Canyon stayed for multiple days. By 1952, the average stay was down to a day, still longer than the average today of six hours. The more pictures, less text format appealed to people taking their 2 week vacation by car and “seeing the country”. Within 10 years of this booklet’s publication, the days of taking a Pullman to the rim were over, just as the swimming pool at Phantom ranch is another long gone pleasure.
Jim