TRAVEL BECAME LUXURY

Pullman Company

Evolution of the Pullman Car: Pullman Facts No. 2

Chicago: The Pullman Company, 1929. PULLMAN SOLD PROGRESS.
A compact and graphically attractive Pullman Company promotional booklet tracing the development of sleeping-car travel from the primitive accommodations of the nineteenth century to the modern Pullman.

THE EVOLUTION OF COMFORT.
Rather than simply advertising luxury, the booklet sells Pullman through comparison. Early sleeping arrangements, lighting, heating, ventilation, furnishings, and bedding are placed beside contemporary improvements, presenting the Pullman car as the product of continuing technological and social progress.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS: A POCKET-SIZED HISTORY OF THE SLEEPING CAR.
+++ Oblong stapled booklet, approximately 6.185 × 3.5 inches; 12 pages including wrappers. 
+++ Color pictorial front wrapper depicting passengers boarding an early Pullman-era railway car. 
+++ Illustrated throughout with historical scenes, diagrams, silhouettes, and photographs contrasting early and modern sleeping-car accommodations.
+++ Rear wrapper lists all twelve titles in the Pullman Facts series and states that copies were available by application to The Pullman Company, Chicago. 
+++ Printed in the U.S.A. by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., Chicago.

CONDITION: Very Good. Stapled binding sound. Light age toning and minor handling and edge wear; small areas of rubbing at the outer edge of the rear wrapper. Interior generally clean and well preserved. Color front wrapper remains attractive.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE: SELLING THE MODERN AMERICAN JOURNEY.
By the early twentieth century, Pullman had helped make the sleeping car one of the defining experiences of American long-distance rail travel. This booklet presents that achievement through the company's own promotional voice, contrasting earlier railway discomfort with increasingly sophisticated sleeping arrangements, lighting, ventilation, heating, sanitation, and passenger service.

As corporate advertising, the booklet is particularly effective because it sells Pullman not simply as luxurious, but as the culmination of continuous technological improvement preserving the company's own presentation of what modern rail travel was supposed to mean on the eve of the 1930s.

GENRES: Railroad Ephemera, Corporate Advertising, Travel Ephemera, Transportation History, Promotional Booklets, Illustrated Ephemera.

SUBJECTS: Pullman Company, Pullman Cars, Sleeping Cars, Railroad Travel, George Mortimer Pullman, Railroad History, Passenger Trains, Luxury Travel, Railway Technology.

Ref: Pullman Museum

Item #22566

Price: $34.00