What is this “the fine art of travelling” gallery ?

The Fine art of travelling is a virtual online gallery created to display and share some of the paper items of 20th century (sometimes older) travel related ephemera collected by Jean-Christophe Loubet del Bayle. Initially launched with a specific URL, the site has been redesigned in 2021 and relocated as a subdomain of the owner personal site.

Everything on this site is original and not reproduction; and nothing is for sale.

What is displayed here ? Travel ephemera ?

According Wikipedia, “ephemera (singular: ephemeron) refers to any transitory written or printed matter not meant to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day. Some collectible ephemera are advertising trade cards, airsickness bags, bookmarks, catalogues, greeting cards, letters, pamphlets, postcards, posters, prospectuses, stock certificates, tickets and zines.”

Practically, will be presented here only travel related ephemera such as luggage labels, travel brochures, postcards and other time tables and maps. Their common identity comes from the fact that they use graphically designed illustrations and not photographies. Most of them are coming from Europe but not all of them. They can be classified in different time periods:

  •  End of 19th to end of 1920’s: Art nouveau inspired style mainly from railways companies (including the famous French PLM railways company);
  • 1930’s: Art deco inspired style from a bigger variety of sources (shipping companies, railways);
  • Post second world war (before the 1960’s): the majority of the hotel labels are from this period. Some of them very classical, some of them very modern (especially those coming from the European communist countries);
  • 1960’s: the end of the golden age of the graphic design in travel ephemera.

Where does this collection come from ?

Jean-Christophe began to collect travel related ephemera in the beginning of the years 2010. He started with a collection of Lucien Boucher’s Air France maps and other PLM 1920’s posters before realizing that they were a bit expensive. In the same time, he realized that it was possible to collect for a reasonable investment, a lot of very beautiful miniatures of these posters in postcards or travel brochures. Initially the collection was focused on travel brochures and progressively diversified with hotel labels for their highly valuable graphic interest.

Travelling vs traveling

According Grammar.com, ‘Travelling and traveling are the two spellings of the same word. Both of these spellings are acceptable and exchangeable in English language but their usage differ according to the part of the world they are spoken in. In American English, the inflected forms of travel take one l—so, traveled, traveling, traveler, etc. In varieties of English from outside the U.S., these forms take two l’s—travelled, travelling, traveller, etc.”

Traveling vs Travelling

Credits & copyrights

If the documents presented here belong to the site publisher, he does not have any publication rights on them; the rights still belong to their initial owner. If you use an image of this website, please credit it from this site and provide the associated link.

  • The ship used for the logotype is coming from a luggage label for the shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd.
  • The typeface used for the logotype and the main titles is Cassanet Plus, a titling font desiged by atypo foundry, based on the style of lettering seen on Cassandre posters (it reminds a bit the capital letters of Cassandre’s font Peignot).
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