Oblong Quarto album ca. 18x29 cm (7 ¼ x 11 ¼ in). 67 black card stock leaves (including eight blank at the rear). With 63 mounted gelatin silver photos, all ca. 8,5x8,5 cm (3 ¼ x 3 ¼ in). All photos with period white ink captions and dates on the mounts (captions relate to one or two images). With manuscript white ink title on the second leaf and extensive manuscript notes on separate leaves. Period brown sheep album fastened with a string; gilt-lettered title “Photographs” on the front board; paper labels “Savaco Photograph Album” and “A. Carlisle & Co., Printers, Stationers, Lithographers, San Francisco” on the inner side of the rear board. Album slightly rubbed on extremities, a couple of photos mildly faded, but overall a very good album of interesting strong photos.

Interesting collection of original gelatin silver photos documenting the state of the 18th-century Franciscan missions in California in the 1930s. Dated August 1933 or May-September 1935, the images show nineteen out of twenty-one missions: Mission Dan Diego de Alcala (church and bell tower), Mission San Carlos de Rio Carmelo (church, entrance gate), Mission San Antonio de Padua (church, aqueduct), Mission San Gabriel Arcangel (side wall of the church, belfry), Mission San Luis Obispo (main entrance to the church), Mission San Francisco de Asis (the original adobe building), Mission San Juan Capistrano (entrance gate, central courtyard, statue of “Fra. Junipero Serra and Indian Boy,” ruins of the “Great Stone Church,” belfry), Mission Santa Clara (church, historic wooden cross), Mission San Buenaventura (church, inner yard with an “olive crusher”), Mission Santa Barbara (general view, church, fountain, inner courtyard, gallery, “Indian wash trough”), Mission La Purisima Concepcion (ruins of the original mission destroyed during the 1812 earthquake, “Indian soap pots”), Mission Santa Cruz (old graves on the mission cemetery), Mission Nuestra Senora Dolorisma de la Soledad (ruins), Mission San Jose de Guadalupe (the main entrance), Mission San Juan Bautista (general view, “grave of the last San Juan Mission Indian under the olive trees brought from Spain at Mission San Juan Bautista, died March 1929”), Mission San Miguel (church, inner courtyard, gallery), Mission San Fernando (gallery with the sign “Curio Shop,” statue of Fra. Junipero Serra and a native child), Mission San Luis Rey (church, courtyard, “first pepper tree brought to California from Peru, 1830”), Mission Santa Ynez (church, belfry). Three images show the Pala Asistencia “sub-mission” to Mission San Luis Rey, established in the modern-day Pala Indian Reservation in northern San Diego County (church, “Victor and Andre Smith, Indian kids at Indian reservation at Pala”). The album also contains a photo of an oil portrait of the founder of the California Missions, Franciscan priest Junipero Serra (1713-1784, canonized by the Catholic Church in 2015). The photos are accompanied by extensive manuscript notes, commenting on the history or contemporary state of the missions. Overall, an interesting original source on the history of the Franciscan missions in California in the first half of the 20th century.