El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

Item Details

El Paso, TX & Columbus, OH:, Word Brothers, Published & Copyrighted by Arthur A. Kline,, 1897., Hardcover

First Edition., VG

Oblong 12mo. 6.25 x 5 in. [24 pp (unpaginated).], Alberthype photo lithograph illustrations on all rectos, text on versos, w/ 1 featuring text illustration of Mexican adobe in Juarez. Gray publisher’s cloth, decorated borders & lettering in black, punch-sewn at gutter margin w/ white silk braid (front hinge just starting, remnants of removed label on back cover), still a VG bright copy.

First edition of this notably uncommon, and fascinating, Albertype style photo-lithographic souvenir travel brochure for El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico when the two cites were still connected together by the El Paso & Juarez Streetcar Line , which went up El Paso Street, and turned at San Francisco Street (now Mill Ave.) in the late 19th-Century where Kline operated his cigar, curio, postcard & photographic shop at then 101/102 el Paso St. This nicely executed photo souvenir includes images of the El Paso County Court House, the El Paso Smelting Works; street shots including views of Meyer’s Opera House, El Paso Street with Kline’s store at the corner, birds-eye view of the Plaza, along with panoramic vies of Fort Bliss, Santa Fe RR, and Southern Pacific RR shops and stock yards. 

The views of Ciudad Juarez include images of cock fighting, Mexican Curiosity Store, several hotels, and City Hall, the Bullfight Ring, the Pecos River Bridge, the rail bridge connecting the two cities, along with several views of the process of making tortillas. Kline (b. 1848) was a Jewish-German-American immigrant into the United States following the Civil War from Alsace-Lorraine, actively maintained relationships with German lithographic companies for postcards and souvenir view books by sending them negatives from which to produce them. In this case, these images were produced by the Scandinavian “Word” Brothers (the miniscule o with slash produced imperfectly on first page in copyright line) in Columbus, OH, but contracted by Kline. Worldcat locates only 5 copies (AZ Hist. Soc., Princeton, Houston Pub., TX A&M, U of TX); See: Unconventional History: El Paso, Texas According to an Early-Twentieth-Century Postcard, Doing History in Public, Univ. of Cambridge (2026).