This fascinating guide book provides directions and photo illustrations for automobile travel from Chicago, Illinois to South Bend, Indiana (and back). From the preface: "The photographic views and their underlined notes clearly indicate guide posts, and the descriptive matter calls attention to every point of interest and attraction, insuring the traveler the best and most convenient roads and enabling him to enjoy all the pleasures to be had on such an excursion." Contents include 5 single-page road maps, 88 photo illustrations with arrows indicating correct turns (2 per page) , numerous advertisements, and related text. Also includes an article on early automobiling entitled "Chicago from the Chauffer's Seat." Published by G.S. Chapin in Chicago. Rand McNally took over the G.S. Chapin firm shortly after the publication of this guide and began issuing their version of auto maps beginning in 1909.

In Walter Ristow's A Half-Century of Oil-Company Road Maps (Quarterly Journal of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, Dec. 1964), he notes that "there was an active interest in photo auto guides around 1905 to 1910. Most common in the middle west, they seem to have been first introduced by H. Sargent Michaels who copyrighted several Photographic Automobile Maps in 1905." Ironically, modern driving applications are duplicating the approach that Michaels, Chapin, and Rand-McNally pioneered over 100 years ago.

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Condition: B+

Contents are mostly clean and bright with an occasional spot or abrasion and the first sheet of advertising has an edge tear. Binding is very good with light shelf wear and a tiny chip at the head of the spine.