GWR promotional booklets

The Great Western Railway published a huge number of booklets covering popular destinations and particular areas of the country served by the GWR, and promoting various services or special arrangements offered. We hold a few examples of these booklets in our collection and many can be found by selecting the 'Promotional Books and Booklets' item under the 'Book collection/GWR books and booklets' option under the 'MEMORABILIA' menu tab, whilst others can be seen on relevant pages within this website. There were so many of these booklets published that it would be impossible to collect all but a small selection, however, whilst not representing items in our collection, we have been able to gather images of many such booklets from various sources since 2014 and thought it would be useful to make them available for reference purposes.

Those covers attributed to Ralph Mott were the product of Ralph & Mott which was a commercial art studio in London whose chief designer and manager was Reginald Lander. They were active during the 1930s designing posters and publicity graphics, with the studio signing their work ‘Ralph Mott’ rather than with the name of the actual artist.

Folded travel booklets

During the 1930s the GWR published a uniform series of folded stapled travel booklets, each year having a different style of cover illustration. Between 1937 and 1938 they often had very colourful wrap-around covers. When folded these booklets were 9" x 4" and, being folded twice, opened up to be 9" x 16" stapled down the centre. Some of these folded booklets changed their name over time, and it is interesting to see the different booklets from the same year sharing the same cover theme and artist or design studio.

Other booklets

This second batch of booklets did not share the same cover illustration styles each year as those illustrated above. Some of these booklets were double folded as above, whilst some were single folded or consisted of a single sheet folded into four. The narrow early ones were about 9" x 3⅝" wide whereas later ones were 9" x 4" matching those seen above. Other booklets were of a larger size.

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