An express train could get you from Montreal to Toronto in 14 hours. Set your watches back 23 minutes when you reach Toronto. You could finish your journey, but otherwise: trains weren't run on Sunday.
Trout's The Railways of Canada (1871) - a Cole's reprint of the early 1970s - is a book many readers will have. It documents the progress of Canadian railway construction up to that point. It presents the financial data and promotes the securities of these companies.
In 1968, a reprint was made from the June, 1868 copy of the Official Guide, located at the New York Public Library ... 'owner of the only copy known to exist'.
The original 1874 book shown in this posting was a railway guide showing maps, timetables and connections with other forms of transportation - notably stages and water routes. It shows how Canadians, food and manufactured products got from place to place in eastern Canada - particularly after ice closed the lakes and rivers.
The Grand Trunk; Montreal Lachine and Province Line; Montreal, St John's and Rouses Point; Brockville and Ottawa; Canada Central; St Lawrence and Ottawa; Toronto and Nipissing; Port Whitby and Port Perry; Midland ... railways are covered in this post.
I can't remember where I bought this artifact - but an artifact it truly is. The first 24 pages were lost before I purchased it. It has existed for 144 years longer than its creators intended. Long ago, most of its fellow copies were tossed into wood stoves.
The printing was done in Montreal - probably by the same company producing the Montreal Gazette. The inking is uneven - as you'll see on the Grand Trunk map. The pages are cut and bound unevenly by today's standards. The typesetting was done before Linotype machines, so each piece of type was arranged by hand. Type sections for many pages were arranged into a large printing frame, and probably printed using the letterpress method. After the impression, the large sheets were cut, folded and bound to form the book.
Besides losing its first section of pages, my copy endured another insult at some point in its existence. It was immersed (perhaps in someone's flooded basement) in water for a while. This caused uneven discolouring of the pages. It also produced nesting 'waves' in the pages throughout the book - which are difficult to temporarily flatten. In practical internet terms, this meant that it was necessary to develop a system to press the book as firmly and evenly as possible on the scanner glass without breaking the latter. My success in this was not consistent.
Almost at my first page, is one of my favourite historical things. A time wheel for Montreal shows the deviation in solar time from the city at the centre - here, assuming it is solar noon at Montreal. This was in the era when few people ventured far from their rural homes.
... The railways transported people over the ground with such 'speed' (here, somewhat over 20 miles an hour for an express train!) that home and destination solar times would be noticeably incongruent. If a Torontonian arrived at a Montreal office for a meeting based on his/her watch which showed his/her home's Toronto solar time ... they would be 23 minutes late.
Below, before social media, people had to look in periodicals to see pseudoscience and medical quackery. Sometimes Phrenology was just a kooky Victorian parlour game. But, for the European practitioners who invented it, it was a method for proving to themselves that skull shape explained why they were superior to all other 'races'. I think you'll find exactly the same engraving in the Wikipedia article on this subject.
In the end, it was used to do a lot of damage to a lot of people as the Eugenics movement developed. It was dusted off and adapted by quacks 'to prove' the superiority of the 'Aryan race' decades later.
... You'd be much better off reading the Corn Exchange reports than studying Phrenology.
The images uploaded to Google were the maximum size I could generate - so you could resolve details.
I don't know how their algorithm has decreased their size as I write this.
