Kodak As You Go." My Kodak Book of Colorado, Utah, and California 1922 [manuscript cover title]

[Various locations in the American West], 1922. Very good.. Seventeen leaves, illustrated with ninety-one photographs and four souvenir postcards, extensively annotated in white ink on the album pages throughout. Contemporary tan two-ring cardboard wrappers, front wrapper with black sheet laid down, titles handwritten in white ink. Minor soiling, rubbing, and edge wear to boards. Minor fraying to some album leaves. A delightful homemade annotated vernacular photograph album compiled by D.S. Alexander, memorializing his journey by automobile, train, and steamship through the American West and down the Pacific coast in August 1922. The album opens with a manuscript title page indicating the locations Alexander visited, which included Manitou Peak, Denver, and Estes Park in Colorado; Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Desert in Utah; and several locations in California, namely San Francisco, Long Beach, Hanford, San Joaquin Valley, and Sacramento. Manitou is the first location pictured, followed by an elevated view and a few others of Denver and the surrounding landscape. He then travels west on the highway, stopping in Loveland to visit a large dam and past Big Thompson Canyon on the way to Estes Park. In Utah he visits "Eagle Gate and Beehive House - Brigham Young's official residence," the Utah state house, Pioneer Park, and includes a couple of "Scenes from the Great Salt Desert in western Utah" on the train to California. In San Francisco he photographs Golden Gate Park and Alcatraz Island from a ferry boat before heading south on the steamship Yale. He includes several images on the shore at Long Beach, as well as scenes at Sequoia Lake in Grant Park, a vineyard in Kings County, the Parker Ranch, large trees in Grant Park, and on the capitol grounds at Sacramento. Somewhat incongruously, the final leaf of the album (and the last three photographs) pictures Alexander onboard a steamship on the Mississippi River in May 1923, on which he took an "excursion from Davenport to Muscatine, Iowa." Ultimately the album is a wonderful and unique photographic snapshot of one young man's journey through Colorado, Utah, and California in the late summer of 1922.