This unique promotional album, showcasing a variety of businesses and other entities in Lincoln, NE, with manuscript “show cards” mounted throughout, was presumably on view in the Hotel Lincoln, where it could be perused by travelers wishing to explore the capital city during the roaring twenties. The album speaks to the use of photography as both a dynamic, mutable advertising apparatus and as a practical guidebook for wanderers in unfamiliar places.

The credited photographs were mostly taken by Lincoln commercial photographer Roy Hindmarsh, with one credited to F. Madonald.

Among the businesses pictured are Armstrong’s Clothing Store; Harris-Sartor Jewelry Co.; Miller’s Tires; Hotel Koehler; Hussong’s Ford Sales; Carpenter Hotel (“a place of comfort and service”); Lincoln Hide and Fur Co. (“furs direct from trapper to consumer”) picturing a fur dealer in the shop examining furs; the Beatrice Creamey Co., etc. Other entities pictured include the University of Nebraska; Green Gables, Dr. Benjamin Bailey’s sanatorium (“a good place to get well and to learn to keep well”; the Lincoln Commercial Club; Antelope Park, and more. A bird’s eye view of Lincoln is included as well.

The showcards are mounted opposite the photographs, thirteen of them corresponding to the photo with which they are paired, and nine advertising businesses that are not pictured, the latter including the calligrapher who designed the show cards, G. H. Walters; chiropractor Dr. Ashworth; Miss Margaret Easter (“manicuring for gentlemen”); Dr. W. H. Slattery, house physician, Dodds Hats for Women (“most exclusive hat shop in city”), and others.

Among the more appealing shots here is that of the establishment of undertaker Henry B. Brown. In front of Brown’s office, two men pose in the driver’s seats of the firm’s handsome private ambulance and its hearse. This composition—of two driver/employees in vehicles is repeated for the ad of Heaston’s Nash Auto Dealers (“when in the market for a real car see us”).