Louis G. Monté collection, 1899, 1907 (majority within 1899)
2 volumes
The Louis G. Monté collection is made up of 2 diaries about Americans traveling in Europe in the summer of 1899. Monté and another traveler wrote entries about sightseeing in several European countries, and both used their journals as scrapbooks.
Louis G. Monté wrote daily diary entries between July 5, 1899, and August 26, 1899 (Volume 1, pages 5-73). He described his journey from Charlestown, Massachusetts, to England on the steamer New England and arrived on July 14. He saw the sights in London, England; Paris, France; Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), Cologne (Köln) and Düsseldorf, Germany; and Amsterdam and Haarlem, Netherlands. He often visited museums and commented on local architecture and customs. Monté's brief final entries pertain to his return journey from Antwerp, Belgium, to New York on the steamer Southwark. Monté also used his book as a scrapbook for photographs and ephemera (pages 1-4 and 1a-36a; not all pages are used), and he wrote notes about French, English, and German currency on pages 2-4. The book's endpapers and cover also have items pasted in, such as tickets, programs, advertisements, and other ephemera. Photographs primarily depict scenes and people in the Netherlands, and numerous drawings illustrate people he encountered during his European travels. Pages 21a-22a (Volume 1) contain an essay on English architecture.
The second diary (unattributed) covers the author's travels from August 3, 1899-August 16, 1899 (pages 1-33), with photographs, stamps, tickets, train schedules, and other ephemera interleaved with the journal entries (pages 34-55 and 1a-55a; not all pages are used). The author drew pictures of people and wrote notes. He visited the same locations as Monté and sketched a nearly identical image of a woman in Aix-La-Chappelle, Germany (Vol. 1, p. 19a; Vol. 2, p. 2). Most of the pasted-in ephemera items pertain to travels in the Netherlands.