Spring

As shoots and spring flowers appear here in Oregon, we catch rare glimpses of the sun. While we won't see then sun regularly until at least April here, the early signs of the new season reminded me of some great Easter postcards I have. I am listing some on Ebay today, but will still have a bunch to spare. Easter cards are quite common, second only to Christmas in popularity in the early 1900s as far as I can tell. They are often beautifully embossed and decorated.

What the...?

I enjoy a good mystery when it comes to postcards, and researching a new and unidentified card is half the fun for me. I got this one at the postcard show and cannot for the life of me find out anything about it. This is even more unusual because the location is right there on the card. Maybe a sleuth out there can find out this fishy mystery...what is going on here?

Foreign Postcards

Foreign postcards are not as collectible as their American counterparts, probably because they generally aren't as valuable, and often require translation. Early in my collecting, I threw my foreign cards aside. Lately, however, I have warmed to the images of faraway lands. I have a decent collection of Japanese and European cards, and am especially drawn to cards showing places in the Middle East. (Stay tuned for a Middle East postcard post soon.) The photo and print quality on these cards is typically great, as most of the best printers in the world were in Europe in the early 1900s, especially Germany. As a bonus, many old foreign cards have interesting stamps and postmarks!

Anthropomorphic

One of the many collectible categories of paper ephemera is anthropomorphics. Commonly known as personification, this term refers to attributing human characteristics to non-human things, such as animals, gods, or even the weather. This was very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and continues to be used frequently in political cartoons today. Almost everyone recognizes the anthropomorphic elephant and donkey of the Republicans and Democrats. Here are a few fun examples, but there are a lot more where these came from.

This is a fairly rare and unusual postcard. I believe there were 4 or 5 in this series, with different somewhat creepy personified ornaments.

Victorian trade cards frequently used anthropomorphic characters.

Not sure what a dapper mouse has to do with thread, but these cards rarely had much to do with the product they advertised.

Nantucket

Sorry for my absence, work is getting hectic! Here are some beautiful new postcards I got just this week. I am listing some of them on Ebay, but may keep a few. I am starting to really appreciate the quality of Detroit Publishing brand postcards!

Many of these are photos taken by a man named H. Marshall Gardiner. He took thousands of photos of Nantucket and many of his best were made into postcards. Most of these are photos by Gardiner:

You can see the corner markings where this card was once housed in an album.

These two Rainbow Fleet cards are pretty nice, but also fetch a price on Ebay that is too good to pass up!

I am getting excited for the Portland Postcard Show coming up next weekend! What are you looking forward to this week?

Football Season

The college football season is yet another sign that Fall is underway, and the NFL is now in full swing as well. These are two more reasons why Fall is such a great season.

I found this series of nine football players posing for photos while sifting through a box of postcards at a local antique store. Looking for truly great postcards can be kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I imagine it is even more so for experienced collectors. 

They probably see the same cards over and over and are less likely to find cards worthy of their collections. As a new collector, I still find great joy in the "treasure hunt" every time I look through a new box of cards.

I think these young men are probably college or possibly even high school players, although I couldn't say where they are from, and there were no notes or other indications of where they played. A far cry from today's uniforms, but the same common poses of young men who believe they are invincible at the top of the world.

Happy Fall!

 Happy Fall everyone! Fall is my favorite season for many reasons. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, I love the leaves changing colors (although don't get as much of this in Oregon as other places I have lived). I love having to grab a sweatshirt now and then. I even love the return of the rainy season (at least for a few weeks, talk to me in December).

This beautiful postcard was printed by the Detroit Publishing Company, a company which produced thousands of different postcards in the early 1900s.

They were able to create color photorealistic images by using a process called chromolithography. Using this technique, the company was able to mass produce color enhanced photographic images long before it was cost effective to print photos in color.

This series is a great choice for beginning collectors because Detroit Publishing cards can be found for low prices, yet offer quality printing and interesting subjects.

The fisherman at right is one of my favorites from the series.

Time to go break open a bag of candy corn!

How I Got Hooked

Whenever anyone starts a new hobby there's always something that hooks them, captures their attention, and makes them want to know more. For me, it was this postcard, a seemingly boring view of some sailboats at sunset. But the fact that the sender lovingly glued pieces of silk over the embossed sails on the front of the card made me realize that postcards played a special part in communication at the start of the 20th Century.

The back shows a 1908 postmark. Only a penny postage!

This realization led me to consider that perhaps there was some significant historical value to postcards as well, and by this time I found myself looking down the rabbit hole of paper ephemera from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I started with an interest in postcards, then got hooked on old photographs, then Victorian trade cards, and now, lately, poster stamps. I was hooked, and my thirst for old things made out of paper was born.