In the 1930s, Canadian Pacific transitioned from what I call the “non-white” menus to “white” menus. The non-white menus came in a variety of colors and formats, with cover illustrations sometimes filling the front cover but more often printed on a yellow, black, or other color background. The white menus started out with an illustration, sometimes surrounded with fancy borders and a few words of text, dropped onto a white background. (In 1948 and 1949 the backgrounds were sometimes cyan, magenta, yellow, or grey, but I still group those with the white menus.)

Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this menu.

This appears to be one of the first white menus. We’ve previously seen a menu with the same image of the Hotel Vancouver, but that menu is taller than it is wide while this one is wider than it is tall. Canadian Pacific did a similar tall menu for the Empress Hotel and I’ve also seen one for the Banff Springs Hotel.

The image in the taller menu is surrounded by cyan borders and the words “Hotel Vancouver” in a typeface called Gillies Gothic that is also cyan colored. This typeface was designed by William Gillies and first released in 1934.

The image on today’s menu cover has no borders and the text appears to be in the Kabel typeface, which was designed by Rudolph Koch and first released in 1927. Neither of the menus are dated, but this one’s prices match menus from 1928 to 1931. For some reason, I haven’t found any CP menus dated 1932 or 1933 so it could be from one of those years as well.

Another clue is that the back cover says CP owned seventeen hotels. A 1934 menu also said seventeen, but menu prices in 1934 were much lower than in 1931, so this one is probably from 1932 or 1933. The tall menus with the Gillies typeface must be from 1934 or, more likely, 1935.