It was the Belle Époque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870-1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home. From the grand boulevards of Paris to China's Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama Canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes delighted in finding "the beautiful way around the world" and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. He coined the term "travelogue" in 1904 to advertise his unique performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of multihued, hand-painted glass-lantern slides and some of the first "moving pictures." Paris, Beijing, Delhi, Dubrovnik, Moscow, Manila, Jakarta, Jerusalem: Burton Holmes was there. He visited every continent and nearly every country on the planet, shooting over 30,000 photographs and nearly 500,000 feet of film. In the years that followed, Holmes traveled extensively: North and South America, Europe, Russia, India, Ethiopia, Burma (now Myanmar). He lectured about such topics as the Panama Canal, the "Frivolities of Paris," even the adventures of Richard Halliburton, one of his competitors in the travel lecture profession. He visited the first modern Olympics in 1896, rode the first trans-Siberian train, and shot what may be the first movies ever made of Japan, in 1899, as well as the first recorded video footage of Korea. In the course of his travels, he crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans more than 50 times. As Holmes became more well-known he brought along assistants, such as Andre de la Varre, to shoot film and stills while he made notes for his lectures, and he also employed a business manager. With the rise of Hollywood, Holmes began to make short travel films for Paramount and later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The Burton Holmes Lectures, based on the slides and his narrations for them, were reorganized into a series of books, originally published in 1901 in ten volumes. In following years he added more volumes, and they remained in print under the name The Burton Holmes Travelogues. 

Vol 1: Into Morocco, Fez, The Moorish Empire 336 pp.

Vol 2:  London, Paris, Berlin 336 pp.(damage to upper edge of spine)

Vol 3.: Olympian Games, Grecian Journey, The Wonders of Thessaly 336 pp.

Vol 4: Cities of The Barbary Coast, Oases of The Algerian Sahara, Southern Spain 336 pp.

Vol 5: Hawaiian Islands, Edge of China, Manila 336 pp.

Vol 6: The Yellowstone National Park, The Grand Canyon of Arizona, Moki Land 336 pp.

Vol 7: Through Europe With A Camera, Oberammergau, Cycling Through Corsica 336 pp.(white marks on back cover)

Vol 8: St Petersburg, Moscow. The Trans-Siberian Railway, 336 pp.

Vol 9: Down The Amur, Peking, The Forbidden City 336 pp. (water stain on back cover)

Vol 10:  Seoul Capital of Korea, Japan The Country, Japan The Cities 336 pp.

Vol 11: Egypt, Southern Italy, Switzerland 336 pp.

Vol 12: Norway, Sweden , Denmark 336 pp.