First Impressions

Abstract

The official emblem of the World in Boston was a robust “Oriental pilgrim” enveloped in white robes with the long disheveled beard of a Moslem patriarch. He stood in “reverent attitude” with his forearms uplifted in front of a cross that offered a view of Boston from its harbor (Exposition Herald 1910c:39). The emblem was on the cover of each issue of the Exposition Herald, the official Handbook and Guide of the World in Boston, and in the pages of secular and religious newspapers and journals, which offered variegated renderings of its sites. The pilgrim also appeared in exposition print ephemera: eye-catching, 11–by–16 inch, chromolithograph exposition posters that were tacked to the bulletin boards of church entrances, Sunday school classrooms, and train stations throughout New England, and on more than a million exposition stamps (or “advertising stickers”) that were affixed to mail matter of all kinds, finding their way to church and home mailboxes (Exposition Herald 1910d:25; figure 1.1). Pin-back gold celluloid badges or “buttons” (one and a quarter inches in diameter), like the one reproduced on the cover of this book, similarly bore an image of the devout Oriental pilgrim, and were sold at wholesale prices to Sunday school teachers to distribute as novelties to their pupils.

Once through the turnstiles of Mechanics Building the first sensation of visitors will, no doubt, be the recognition that before their eyes is a feast of color and spectacle such as rarely meets the gaze of an untraveled American.

—Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 1910