Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America

Coast to Coast presents an extraordinary journey—via rail, steamboat, automobile, and even horseback— of a continent just beginning to discover itself. Traveling through the great cities, magnificent landscapes, and highways of a bygone America, the book is illustrated with vintage photographs, posters, travel brochures, and other charming ephemera.

By the end of the 19th century, North America was fully settled, and the era’s robust economy led to the invention of affordable popular tourism. Even people of modest means could comfortably tour the continent, and a wealth of tourist attractions awaited: Niagara Falls, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon and other sites in the brand-new national parks, New York’s Pennsylvania Station, San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the French Quarter in New Orleans, the Banff Springs Hotel, and many more.

With five maps and nine color inserts of facsimile menus, guidebooks, and vintage postcards displaying everything from cog railways running up Mount Washington to ostrich farms outside Pasadena and Arkansas’s spectacular Hot Springs, this brilliantly researched book provides a tour of an America just beginning to flex its muscles as a world-class tourist attraction. Praise for Coast to Coast

“Most Americans, it seems, are always willing – even eager – to pack a Samsonite bag or a Winnebago van and head off to see what lies down the road, across the mountains or on the other side of the continent. This restlessness isn’t a new trait, as author Anthony Shugaar and his colleagues demonstrate in this richly illustrated overview of travel in North America during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Like a cherished family photo album, Coast to Coast offers a fascinating and engaging record of where we went, how we got there, what we saw and, perhaps most important, what we learned along the way – not just about our country’s historic sites and scenic wonders but also about ourselves. It’s been a terrific trip, and this book brings it vividly to life.”--Richard Moe , President National Trust for Historic Preservation
"Coast to Coast made me realize with despair that I was born a hundred years too late. I want to travel on those trains, camp in those tents, and spend weeks, if not months, in those hotels. I want to order the crab croquettes at the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1880, and I want to cross Lake Michigan on the S. S. Christopher Columbus in 1893. Anthony Shugaar has assembled a North American scrapbook from a time when our continent was still big enough to get lost in. Reading it is like paging through a dream." David Owen, Author, The Walls Around Us, Sheetrock & Shellac
“For every image that colors in a vague conception of a classically American time and place, the book shows us something totally unexpected.” ~ Stephen Heyman, The Moment/NYT

“Coast to Coast certainly gives a new meaning to the joyful pursuit of imaginary travel.” ~ Erica Johansson, Travel Blissful

“Travels romantic past is lovingly evoked in Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America.” ~ Hemispheres “Filled with engaging vintage photographs.” ~ Ann Tatko-Peterson, The Oakland Tribune

“Sure to get conversations going with older relatives and spark amusement in younger ones.” ~ Helen Anders, Statesman.com