This beautiful colour illustration was created as an advertisement for the Pacific Coast Trunk Store in San Francisco circa 1880, and was recently uploaded to the California Historical Society’s Flickr Photostream.

Surely this ad campaign attempted to show just how much stuff a late nineteenth-century traveller could cream into a Pacific Coast suitcase; a bottle of whiskey and a hip-flask, cigars as well as a pipe and tobacco, breath mints, soap, a tooth brush and toothpaste, a comb and a shaving brush, photographs, an Émile Zola novel and an 1883 almanac. Maybe tha’s a set of pajamas in the bottom left hand corner?

You can check out more of the good stuff that the CHS has digitized here http://www.flickr.com/photos/chs_commons/