Lippman Kamprite Trailer (Retail display composite photograph, circa 1922)

St. Louis, MO: Lippman Kamprite Trailer Company, 1922. Vintage oversize double-weight composite retail display photograph, showing 18 images of the Lippman Kamprite Trailer, circa 1922.

Originally produced in 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri, the Lippman Kamprite Trailer was one of the earliest self-contained travel trailers. Advertised as "a real camp home in three minutes," the trailer boasted beds for four, a privacy partition, hammocks for clothes, and a tail lamp. The composite photograph on offer here displays the assembly and functionality of the trailer in eighteen charming images, and was almost certainly used for retail display.

As production-line manufacturing of affordable automobiles began in the early twentieth century and car ownership boomed, the production of auto trailers, and goods and amenities for auto touring followed close behind. A number of creative and unusual apparatuses marketed for auto touring appeared in the 1910s including bed kits for car interiors, bed and tent kits which mount to the running board and about the car, as well as a variety of early auto trailers. The following decade, the 1920s, would be a golden age for motor camping, with the refinement of the design of tent trailers and the advent of travel trailers. A charming relic of the golden age of motor camping.

13.5 x 19.5 inches. Very Good plus, with a small closed tear to the top margin, two modest chips to the bottom margin, and a modest chip to the bottom right corner repaired with cello tape on the verso. Clean, sharp, and unfaded.