[Fantastic Photos of New Mexico]

New Mexico, 1930. Very good +. 12” x 9”. Gathering of 14 construction paper pages side-stapled with 30 B&W photographs corner-mounted. Most photos 2½” x 4¼”, two slightly smaller, typed captions adhered to every page. Gathering good: seemingly removed from a larger book; one leaf detached, remainder partially so. Photos very good plus or better.

This is a brief but wonderful collection of photographs showing what appears to be a tour through the southwest on a chartered bus line called “The Eyes of Texas.”

The pages seem to have been removed from a larger album; the first page, labeled “Texas,” is lacking its two photos, and the remainder show scenes throughout New Mexico. The buses are seen in a handful of shots, and look like 1930s Ford Model AA chassis with custom wooden bodies. The entertaining captions reveal a few of the tourists, including “Helmi” posed with a Route 85 marker in Las Vegas (“one of our stops on the way to Taos”) and a man with the stance of a “Prize Fighter of Amarillo. He looks like one, doesn't he?” There are fantastic shots at Cimarron and Glenrio, of children, horses, men making adobe bricks, women at the well, and the former home and final “resting place” of frontier legend Kit Carson. Our compiler celebrates the locals met along the way, including “cowboys,” “girl riders,” “happy Spanish maids” and “Matilda,” who “showed us the interesting spots in Taos. She took us to her home where we met her mother who could not speak English at all.” A few photos show enjoyable visits to the schoolhouse and fish hatchery, as well as the “ancient church” and then-sparse town of Taos, where the houses are “made of mud. Streets run in every direction. Not a street is named, not a house has a number, there is no officer in the town, yet everyone is safe.”

A great group of photos showing a 1930s trek through New Mexico.