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This album consists of 24 leaves/48 rigid pages. Most of the photographs are Kodak No. 2, round discs 3 1/2-inches in diameter, giving the whole collection an unusual and attractive look. The photographs are well-attached and have aged gracefully - moody and atmospheric and lovely to peruse. The inside front cover is inscribed by its owner and, presumably, compiler: Martha T.H. Fiske, dated 1891. The captions accompanying most photographs are in a similar cursive. The find a grave website includes a photo of the grave of one Martha Towner Hayt Fiske, 1863-1943, buried in South Corning, Steuben County, New York, in the Hayt Family plot. This is very likely the same person. The gravestone inscription lists her husband as Thomas Perry Fiske. Mrs. Fiske died not two months before her 80th birthday. Dates of photographs are carefully noted to the month but, as the travelog does not follow strict chronological order, but rather geographic, we shall describe the American section first, which comes in the latter part of the album. In 1896, the couple travel through New Mexico, and a few photographs of Native Americans are featured. Thence they traveled to Los Angeles, with many photos of the grounds around the famous Raymonde Hotel resort in South Pasadena. These pictures include rare views of the old hotel building soon before it burnt to the ground. Views of Riverside in its rural splendor are especially picturesque. Up the coast they traveled to the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, and its surrounding gardens; the campus of Stanford University, in Palo Alto; nearby Menlo Park, and a few pictures of the rocky coast; thence east to Park City, Utah, for a brief visit. All of the photos in this eight-page section are of the aforementioned Kodak No.2 type. The couple took a short trip to Hot Springs, Virginia, in late 1898/early 1899; 1900 finds them in Lakewood, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Augusta, Georgia. Another four-page section was devoted to these trips, however, only the photos from Hot Springs are round; the rest are rectangular, and also splendidly arrayed on the page in geometric fashion, though unfortunately these photos have faded dramatically. The last journey, both chronologically and within the album, sees our heroes escaping the snow in January 1901 to Florida: St. Augustine, Palm Beach, Bethesda-by-the-Sea, and, finally, the seaside towns of Lake Worth and Ormond. This trip is told in five pages, and these photos, too, are rectangular - 4 1/8" x 2 1/2". The black-and-white of this section is very present and evinces very little of the fading we see in other parts. To return to the front section, which documents European adventures, the album begins aboard the La Bretagne ocean liner, in April 1891. One photo, taken as it was nearing the continent, is captioned thus: "2450 miles from New York". Photos of the traveling couple, some sailors, and the captain of the ship are included, and the excitement of the upcoming adventures is palpable. Over the course of three and a half months, and nineteen pages, our travelers traverse much of Western Europe. In France, our couple visited La Roche, Macon, Toulon, Les Arcs, St. Raphael, Faucon, Cimiez, Nice (several pages), and Grasse. Crossing through Monte Carlo, they arrived in Pisa - the tower was leaning e ven then - Rome, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri, Mt. Vesuvius; back north to Venice for a couple of pages, and briefly over to Lake Thun, in Switzerland, before heading to England: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Kenilworth, and Missenden. Mid-July sees our heroes returning Stateside aboard the Teutonic. The album picks up in 1895, aboard La Touraine, again to France: along the Seine to Versailles, Charenton-le-Pont, south to Aix-les-Bains and Le Bourget-du-Lac. This journey takes up three pages. 1899, and we are on the move again: Alexandria and Cairo in northern Egypt; over to Athens in Greece, west again to Naples and again to Sorrento, Capri, Pompeii, and Rome. This journey is.
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