Motograms: Motion Picture Technology Meets Automobile Travel in 1915
First edition of this remarkable and very rare early California auto travel guidebook, which melds the region's most characteristic emerging industrial technologies - automobiles and motion pictures - on the brink of their all-out breakthrough into dominating the cultural scene. Published by the Motogram Company of Richmond, California, the book includes an astonishing 2084 separate photographic images made to provide pictorial guidance to the early Pacific coast motorist. This unprecedented photographic record of early West Coast motorways is akin to a collection of stills from a movie. Indeed, the title vignette is an illustration of a film labeled "Made from the Movies."
The Pictorial Mileage Road Book illustrates auto travel through California (from Oakland to Tijuana) - and up to Oregon as well - through strips of small photographs which are arranged on the page like movie stills, fully evoking the kinetic promise and excitement of the still-novel technologies of automobiles and the cinema. Further, the guidebook stands as a crucial visual record of the state of auto travel at the time: unpaved roads through a largely rural landscape, showing the early garages, crossroads, parking areas, etc., that any motorist would have seen, while, say, touring south toward San Diego to attend the Panama-California Exposition held there in 1915.
The book includes descriptions of road conditions, indications of roads under construction, and the like. Each section of the covered area begins with an overview map, and each of the small photo images are captioned with concise essential notes about the road quality or other indicators important to the driver. The profusion of ads adjacent to the photo strips are perfectly calibrated to the places depicted, touting the latest restaurants, garages, auto dealers, hotels, tourist spots, even illustrating some of the burgeoning roadside billboards. The final page of the guidebook illustrates the last leg of travel to the border with Mexico, between National City and Tijuana.
While superficially similar to the Photo-Auto Guides popularized by Rand, McNally after that firm's 1910 acquisition of the sole publishing rights from inventor Gardner S. Chapin, the present work is rather a different animal. Unlike the Rand, McNally production, the photos in the Motogram guide are arranged like movie film strips keyed to sectional road maps, with ten images on each page. The images often include views of automobiles on the land, traveling on roadways, clearly indicating the type of pavement - concrete, gravel, or unpaved - to the user.
The Motogram Company prefaced the work declaring that "California roads are so uniformly well marked that maps of minute detail are unnecessary." This statement suggests the practical superiority of visual road guides but seems somewhat at odds with the argument made by Nick Paumgarten in his fascinating New Yorker article on driving direction technologies. Paumgarten, apparently overlooking the advantages of the visual, relates these early photo road guides to verbal itineraries, demoting them to less sophisticated little brothers of real maps:
[Such photo road guides] were precise and mechanical attempts to replicate the oldest navigation tool on earth: landmark-based instructions, transmitted verbally or in writing by a person with local knowledge... Before there were maps, as we understand them, there were itineraries, sequences of customized directions. Maps, to say nothing of the ability to read them, were the stuff of progress. To see and depict the landscape in such abstract terms, as you might from above, requires a measure of sophistication that the mere itinerary, with its blindered view of the world, does not. So it's curious that the current geographic revolution is in many ways a reversion to primitive techniques: it is a high-tech gloss on the lowest-tech approach. - Paumgarten, "Getting There: the Science of Driving Directions."
The addition of photographs to the old verbal itineraries would seem to turn them into something entirely new. And the similarity between the Motogram guidebook to modern-day visual mapping technologies such as Google Street View highlights the obvious: that the repurposing of photographic technology offers endless possibilities in any new media.
California Motor Vehicle Act of 1913
The volume begins with the text of the California Motor Vehicle Act of 1913, the first comprehensive motor vehicle law in California, and among the first such laws in the nation. The Act was a response to the rapidly growing number of automobiles in California and the accompanying need for formalized traffic laws to ensure safety and order on the roads. It also established a more detailed and structured framework for the registration of motor vehicles and licensing of drivers.
Philip S. Cole, active ca. 1910-1925, was a pioneer auto dealer for Haynes Motor Cars in Oakland, California from 1910 to 1920. He then managed the Bush Automotive dealership in San Francisco. He was among the earliest promoters of automobile travel in California to understand the importance of photographic guidance for the motorist.
The book is nicely printed and bound by the Berkeley printers Lederer, Street, & Zeus Co., yet few examples of the guidebook survive today. This suggests a small print run, or heavy use by drivers resulting in attrition of extant copies.
Rarity
Very rare in the market. This is the first example we have handled. Original examples of the Pictorial Mileage Road Book are highly sought after. Only a single example has appeared in RBH, about ten years ago. Not noted in Michael Vinson's Motoring Tourists and the Scenic West, 1903 to 1948 (1989), which, while highly selective, sought to highlight important early auto travel items held in the De Golyer Library at SMU and included a specific section on highway guides. The De Golyer still lacks this book.