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Rare early lettersheet edition of Putnam's sought after decorative promotional map of Newport Harbor and Newport Beach, California, issued by the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce.
Claude Putnam's map of Newport Bay is perhaps the most iconic early promotional pictorial map for the Newport area. Putnam was an illustrator who lived in Glendale and worked in Los Angeles. Born in Michigan in 1884, he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He did advertisements, book plates, model-making, engraving, printing, and cartography. He was locally well-known and was the founder and first president of the Advertising Art Association of Southern California.
Putnam was a member of the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, which led to his creation of this remarkable promotional map for the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce. The maps were issued in varying sizes from Postcards up to 18 x 16 inches, and went through numerous editions in the 1930s and 1940s.
Putnam also created a pictorial map for the developers of Beverly Hills in 1912, and later created various maps of California history and the Old West, although he is best known for his Roads to Romance map, first published in 1946.
The present example is the only example we have ever seen of the map used as a lettersheet for the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce, and includes a letter sent to Helen Wengert of Averill Park in New York by Harry Welch, the Chamber Secretary, and includes a commemorative first day cover and stamp from the San Diego California Pacific Exposition of 1935.
We note only a single example of the lettersheet in OCLC, in the collection of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimated date of 1933, and an on line illustration of a variant in the collection of the Orange County Historical Society, with an estimated date of 1931. ochistorical.blogspot.com/2011/11/newport-harbor-and-claude-g-putnam.html
