Excursion Through America (Lakeside Classic No. 71)

Chicago: The Lakeside Press (R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company), 1973 WYSIWYG pricing--no added shipping charge for standard shipping within USA. Full dark blue cloth, gilt titles on spine & device on front board, lxxvi, 398 pp, folding map, b & w illustrations. When the Northern Pacific railroad was completed in 1883, Henry Villard, a German immigrant and the railroad's president, organized a vast excursion consisting of four special trains and about 240 dignitaries and journalists. About a quarter of these were from Germany and England, where Villard hoped to raise additional capital as the building of the road had gone far over budget. Mohr was one of the German journalists, editor of the Weser-Zeitung of Bremen. The party was lavishly entertained both by the railroad and by citizens' committees all along the way. The climax of the trip was the ceremony of the laying of the last rails and driving of the final spike where the eastern and western sections of the railroad met near Helena, Montana. Mohr's account of this trip, published in Berlin in 1884, combined dispatches sent back to Bremen while he was traveling with recollections written later. This has been translated by La Vern J. Rippley and Klaus Lanzinger, and edited by Ray Allen Billington of the Huntington Library, who has rearranged the text in diary format and added illustrations and historical footnotes. The book also contains a publisher's preface describing R. R. Donnelly's business, which shrank drastically when Life magazine ceased publication, and the production process--this is the first of the Lakeside Classics series to have used "high-speed computer-controlled electronic character generators." Fits in small flat-rate box. Shipping weight 2 lbs.. First Edition in English. . Fine/No dj. 17½ X 11½ cm.