[Substantial Photograph Album Featuring Forty-Four Large-Format Photographs Showing Street Views of Early-20th-Century Kansas City]

Kansas City: Anderson Photo Company, 1920. [22] leaves, illustrated with forty-four linen-backed black-and-white silver gelatin photographs, each about 7.5 x 9.75 inches, most with Anderson Photo Company credit in the negative, all in mounting corners. Oblong folio. Contemporary black cloth photograph album with blind-embossed floral designs in the corners of each cover, bound with twin black bolts. Light wear to binding. Occasional creasing and minor surface wear to photographs. Very good. A fantastic collection of forty-four large-format photographs showing street views of Kansas City by the Anderson Photo Company. Many of the images feature bustling scenes in the downtown area, picturing busy intersections populated with crossing guards, moving traffic, trolley cars, pacing pedestrians, and more. The views also, naturally capture large, towering buildings, capturing the businesses operating at the time, as well as  advertising signage for period products and companies. Among the businesses featured here are the Olney Music Company, Harzfeld's Parisian Cloak Company, Federmann's Pharmacy, the Kansas City Post, Hershfield's Jewellers, the Old Dutch Mill Cafe, McElwain's Wax Museum, and numerous others. Some of the advertisers seen here include Bell Telephone, Uneeda Biscuit, Coca Cola, and Victrola. A marquee outside the 10th Street Theatre advertises Mary Pickford's Hearts Adrift, which premiered in 1914, indicating that the theater may have been showing the film as a revival, or perhaps that some of the present photographs could emanate from the 1910s. The composition of several of the photographs are centered in the street, with the photographer shooting straight down street over multiple blocks, highlighting the urban canyon nature of the downtown area. The last few photos feature scenes outside downtown picturing the areas around the riverside Pabst brewery, the Kansas City Hay Press, and two shots of the suburbs.

The Anderson Photo Company was one of the most active commercial studios in the Kansas City area for about six decades between the 1910s and 1970s. Early advertisements indicate the firm was first known as the Anderson Commercial Photography Company, and was often the only photography studio advertising in the Kansas City Post between 1912 and 1915. The company was operated by partners Lawrence C. Dalla and Orville W. Anderson. The studio's credit appears on legions of newspaper images throughout most of the next fifty-plus years. Images from the Anderson Photo Company appear in a few Missouri institutions, but the present album focusing on downtown Kansas City, and emanating from early on in the studio's history, would be a welcome addition to any institutional collection.