Maslin, Marshall

A Camera Tour in Full Color San Francisco and Bay Cities [Early color photography, Pre-war San Francisco, Bay Area Cityscapes, Large-format Pictorial]

San Francisco: The Printing Corporation, 1938. 1st Edition. Soft cover.

A handsome and scarce pre-war color pictorial capturing San Francisco and the Bay Cities at the height of late-Depression optimism, presented through richly saturated oil-color printing rather than standard process color. Large, bold, and visually immediate, this album offers a striking snapshot of the region just before wartime transformation reshaped the city and its shoreline.

Physical Description: Oblong softcover pictorial album. Heavy-stock stapled wrappers printed in silver, black, and yellow. Oblong format measuring approximately 14 × 11 inches. 28 pages, including two pages of introductory text and 25 full-color photographic plates, each with caption text. Includes a bird’s-eye map illustration of the San Francisco Bay region. Color images printed in oil colors without the use of process color plates.

Condition: Bindings are firm and square; staples tight and secure. Interior clean and bright with strong color saturation throughout. Light age-darkening along the upper edges of the wrappers and mild water spotting below the bird motif on the front cover. Overall Very Good+ example of a fragile, display-oriented softcover. First Edition.

Published in 1938, A Camera Tour in Full Color belongs to a brief but visually ambitious moment in American pictorial publishing, when publishers experimented with oil-color printing to achieve depth and vibrancy before modern offset color processes became dominant. Maslin’s images present San Francisco not as a gritty port city but as a modern, sunlit metropolis—bridges, civic architecture, sweeping aerials, and shoreline vistas rendered with painterly warmth.

The oversized format reinforces the book’s function as a visual object rather than a guidebook, aligning it more closely with presentation albums produced for tourists, boosters, and armchair travelers during the late 1930s.

Contextual / Historical Significance
Issued on the eve of World War II, the album documents San Francisco and the Bay Area at a pivotal transitional moment—after the Golden Gate Bridge opened, yet before wartime industrialization dramatically altered the region. As such, it holds particular appeal for collectors of California history, early color photography, and interwar American visual culture.

Subjects: San Francisco history; San Francisco Bay Area; 1930s American photography; Pre-World War II California; Urban landscapes; Travel and tourism imagery, California pictorials; Early color photography; American regional photography.

Item #21393

Price: $85.00