From at least 1902 through 1930, Rock Island regularly published a booklet about Colorado subtitled Under the Turquoise Sky. We’ve previously seen eight editions here including ones from 1907 and 1909. This one is from 1908 and not surprisingly is something of a combination of the 1907 and 1909 versions.

Click image to download a 23.0-MB PDF of this 84-page booklet.

All three have 84 pages with similar chapters and text that follows similar outlines though not word for word. Most of the photographs are different but the 1908 version does have a few photos in common with either 1907 or 1909.

The 1907 edition had clumsy chapter titles such as “The Colorado Stream That Will Not Yield A Trout Is As Rare As the Stream in the Older States That Will.” The 1908 edition changed that to the much more elegant “Six Thousand Miles of Trout Streams,” a change that was maintained in 1909. The photos in all three editions are somewhat muddy but successfully convey the idea that Colorado scenery is spectacular.

All three booklets, along with the 1905 but not 1902 or 1913 editions, say “Copyright by John Sebastian.” Sebastian was the Rock Island’s passenger traffic manager. By 1913, he had been promoted to third vice president and his replacement, L.M. Allen, had his name on the copyright notice even though the text was pretty similar to the 1907-1909 editions. I suspect that Sebastian and Allen didn’t personally write the text but they probably edited and gave final approval to text written by people who worked for them.

Since we’ve seen nine editions of Under the Turquoise Sky between 1902 and 1930, how many more did Rock Island publish? In addition to the ones we’ve seen (1902, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1913, 1921, 1924, 1928, and 1930), WorldCat, a compendium of library catalogs, lists editions from 1904, 1906, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1926, and 1933. While it was probably an annual publication with the exception of the war years, some editions didn’t change much from year to year. From what I’ve seen, the 1912 and 1913 editions and 1926 and 1928 editions had the same covers and were nearly identical inside.