TRAVEL BROCHURES & ADVERTISING

Antique and Vintage Travel Brochures and Tourism Advertising

This category brings together original antique and vintage travel brochures, tourism promotional material and travel advertising ephemera from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the era in which the modern tourism industry was born and in which the illustrated travel brochure emerged as the primary vehicle of destination promotion for railways, shipping companies and national and regional tourist bodies. These works document the visual history of travel promotion with an immediacy and authenticity that makes them significant both as historical documents and as examples of commercial graphic art at its most inventive and appealing.

The railway age transformed travel within Britain, Europe and beyond from a luxury available to the wealthy few into a mass-market activity within reach of the rapidly expanding middle classes, and the railways that made this transformation possible were among the earliest and most prolific producers of illustrated promotional material. Railway company brochures and timetables, illustrated with views of destinations served by the network, were produced from the 1860s onwards in editions of considerable visual ambition. The collaboration of the railways with leading artists — a tradition established by the London and North Eastern Railway’s celebrated commissions from artists including Frank Brangwyn and Tom Purvis — produced tourism advertising of genuine artistic quality that transcended its promotional function.

Shipping line promotional material documents the era of ocean travel with equal visual richness, as the great passenger lines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries competed for passengers through advertising that depicted their vessels and destinations in the most appealing terms available. Brochures for routes to Australia, the Mediterranean, the Far East and the Americas carry a nostalgic weight as records of a mode of travel that defined the experience of long-distance movement for an entire era before the advent of commercial aviation.

Australian tourism ephemera — produced by state and federal tourist bodies, railways and shipping companies to promote travel within the continent and attract visitors from abroad — forms a particularly significant subcategory for Australian collectors, documenting the visual history of Australian tourism promotion from the colonial era through to the mid-20th century with a specificity of local reference that gives these materials their particular historical character.

Antique travel brochures and tourism advertising are collected for their historical documentation of the travel industry, their visual appeal as commercial graphic art, and their evocation of a world of travel that combined adventure with the particular aesthetic of each era’s printing and design conventions.