Le Centenaire des Postes Alpestres Suisses

Publication Year: 1933.

Le Centenaire des Postes Alpestres Suisses. 4 to. Geneva: “L’Art en Suisse,” 1932. Price Fr. 6.

This attractive volume, also issued with English text, has been published by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs of Switzerland. It is well illustrated, with color-plates by such artists as d’Elzingre and F. Gos, and reproductions of old prints and interesting documents, tracing the evolution of Swiss postal services across the Alps during the past century. One reads the diverting story of Greville, the Englishman, who conquered the St. Gothard in a fiacre in the good old days of the eighteenth century when the passes were first coming into use as routes of despatch. The history of the federal diligences is traced from 1850 to 1920, following which the thesis is maintained that “the postal-motors are brutes created and nourished by the mountains.” A chapter is devoted to the perennial struggle with snow, and full statistical tables are witnesses of progress in the opening of routes.

J. M. T.