Category: Illustrated Postcards

Penny Provocations

Beware! This is what the vote will do to husbands. Four cards from a strange 1909 anti-suffrage series.

Today, we’re looking at four rare postcards from a twelve-card series published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York in 1909. The complete set buffoons the women’s suffrage movement through role-reversal cartoons depicting men holding babies and scrubbing on washboards. The popular message was that women would be turned masculine, greedy, uncaring, and unfaithful once given the vote. Our grouping includes card numbers 1, 3, 4, and 10. The most emblematic is Suffragette Madonna, which has been the focus of substantial scholarship.

A man stands in three-quarter view, dark hair combed back, a thin mustache. He cradles an infant against his shoulder with one arm. He wears a white pinstriped shirt, cuffs fastened with round studs, a red necktie, and a wide red sash draped diagonally across his chest. The infant, dressed in a white slip with pink ribboned booties, drinks from a small bottle held in the man's free hand. Behind his head sits a circular gold medallion ringed with a laurel wreath, forming a halo. A blue paneled backdrop holds two dark ceramic vessels on a shelf, one on either side of the halo.
A man in a floral red-and-white patterned robe, cinched with a tasseled cord belt, holds two crying infants in white gowns against his chest. His brow is drawn, his expression strained. In the upper left corner, a circular inset vignette shows a woman addressing a crowd from a bunting-draped stage under the caption "Let the Women Run the Government," with an American flag and a pitcher and glass on the speaker's table.
A young woman stands facing forward, dark hair pinned beneath an oversized straw hat banded in yellow with a large red bow at the crown. She wears a puff-sleeved white blouse tucked into blue denim overalls, hands in the front pockets. Red-and-white polka-dot stockings show above black heeled shoes trimmed with small red bows. A ruled vertical-line pattern fills the background panel behind her.
A couple seen from behind, mid-embrace. The man wears a brown suit; his bowler hat falls from his head and his walking stick drops from his hand in a gesture of surprise. The woman wears a long red coat-dress with a row of covered buttons down the back and an oversized black hat trimmed in pink roses. Her skirt has swept up with the motion, showing a white ruffled petticoat and a stockinged leg above a black heeled shoe.

Each card colorfully illustrates the presumed ill-effects of role reversal in a domestic or civic scene. Men feed infants, wash clothes, or otherwise occupy the era-assigned roles for women. Meanwhile, women take on masculine dress, public authority, and open flirtation.

In the first card, a father poses as a religious icon, complete with laurel leaves and halo, while nursing a baby with a bottle. Another card repeats the theme with a father annoyed by two crying infants. A tiny inset shows his wife commanding a political rally and calling for women to run government. The next card puts a young woman in coveralls under an enormous flopping hat, garments that speak to independence, work, and whimsy unbecoming of a lady. The last card shows a couple mid-embrace, with a headline suggesting sexual favors as an easy vote-getting behavior.

Across all four postcards, the palette includes saturated reds, blues, and golds, with exaggerated Edwardian dress rendered in the exacting art of lithographic printing. Though intentionally brusque, the cards were considered beautiful and humorous for obvious and covert reasons. Captions run along the bottom border in bold sans-serif type, and do as much comic work as the illustrations themselves.

All four cards are chromolithographs published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York, copyrighted 1909. Three of these cards carry a gold-toned outer border created with the bronzing technique described in Gilded Goods. The fourth uses a plain blue-ruled border with no metallic finish. Each card includes a series number, a title band, and a copyright line naming the publisher.

These cards are unused and uncancelled, double-matted and handsomely framed, with only minor softening of corners. Each card alone is considered rare and small sets in presentation format are uncommon in the marketplace. Several complete sets are held in public and private collections. Catherine Palczewski’s 2005 academic essay in Quarterly Journal of Speech increases demand and value for these items compared to similar postcards of the era.

Four antique postcards displayed together in an ornate gilt wood frame with a wide cream mat, arranged left to right: Suffragette Madonna, Where Oh Where Is My Wandering Wife Tonight, Pantalette Suffragette in the Sweet Bye and Bye, and Suffragette Vote-Getting the Easiest Way. Each card sits in its own beveled mat opening within a scalloped, floral-carved gold frame.

Subject, scarcity, provenance, and condition are the top variables that govern the market value for vintage postcards, but serious academic attention changes the equation. Once Palczewski examined this set and published an article, they went from cultural detritus to a documented contribution to the historical record. Palczewski identified the visual tropes (a male Madonna and feminized Uncle Sam), connected them to the verbal rhetoric of the anti-suffrage movement, and lent theory and vocabulary for later researchers and collectors to better interpret the materials.

Provenance, in this instance, is not just about who created or owned an object. It is also about who has looked at it seriously and left notes. A card with a known scholarly citation carries a paper trail that an anonymous postcard never gets. It brings it out of obscurity and into a realm of the studied object. From there, new analysis has a footing and further creative work may be inspired, too.

None of this changes the material object, a piece of lithographed cardstock, printed and mailed for a penny in 1909. What scholarship changes is the frame around it and what we can make of it today. Out of the thousands of anti-suffrage postcards produced in that era, these ones are still worth examining more than a century later.

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Study Break

Dear Readers, I write to you from in between places today, tucked away in a sunny spot at the airport, patiently waiting for a delayed flight. Not so inspiring for deep thought or focused storytelling, but a nice chance to catch up on a few page updates and to share some big news.

I talked myself into enrolling in a doctoral program in Information Studies at University of Maryland in College Park. Classes started this week. That’s the big news. Countless times in my career I have stopped studying to focus on work, or passed on an opportunity because of my age, the cost, or the lack of a noteworthy topic. This time, I leapt at the chance.

My fellow students are majority middle-aged, too. Most already hold leadership roles in libraries and archives, or manage records for huge federal agencies. We all seem to know a lot, and share the sense that there is so much more to discover. Leading universities are searching for the business model for lifelong learning. My bank account tells me they’re onto something.

The program is organized around leadership, which I love and have studied and taught extensively. It’s nice to revisit topics like motivation, inclusive management strategies, and creative ways of knowing, and to see how much the literature has incorporated these concepts that were seen as quaint not so long ago. I recall vividly having to convince my policy professors that ‘cultural policy’ was indeed ‘a thing’ and that artists had unique mindsets and methods that could contribute to policy strategy and decision-making as often as they could enhance the delivery of social goods across sectors. The entire field of arts and healthcare has come along in the meantime. I hope it has reached you!

But, I’m not here to teach or even to learn more about what I know. Instead, I’m keenly interested in what I don’t know, and what postcards still have to say about who we have been. The front of a postcard usually tells the story of how we wanted to be seen. The back tells us what we actually said to each other.

Obviously, vintage postcards aren’t new, but it’s only with the latest technology (combined with my own ceaseless squinting) that makes it possible to read them in bulk and in context. As we came to understand with Nurse Aird, even a small collection saved by one person long ago can open a window on history.

Finding new ways to source wisdom has always been my aim with The Posted Past, along with a desire to better stay in touch and avert loneliness in my late father, myself, and others. Actually, there is a new theoretical approach that has caught my attention. Weak theory (popularized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick) offers that digging deep isn’t the only way to discover. Sometimes staying at the surface shows us more. Also, all-encompassing theories aren’t terribly compelling for understanding our complex and absurd world.

The weak theory framework is a better match for the quixotic and episodic nature of the study of postcards, epistolaries that form their own epistemologies as we look closer. It’s no less serious to me. In fact, probably more so since I’m paying for it dearly. I hope the effort will bring value to you, too. The Posted Past will certainly become more of a resource. To that end, here are a few pages to make your own searches easier.

Tips on Evaluating Postcards – Learn to look a little closer for the clues.

Places to Buy and Sell Postcards – Where to collect and how to connect.

Major Postcard Collections – Archives to visit online and in-person.

Postcard Search Categories – Postcards are about (nearly) everything!

Gilded Goods

Today we’re looking at a group of twenty opulent floral postcards from the early 1900s. Botanical illustrations (roses, poppies, carnations, tulips, violets, cornflowers, hydrangeas, and gladiolus) are printed on rich metallic backgrounds.

Though these cards are not a matching set, they are of an era. At the time they were made, a rising middle class was creating new demand for affordable luxury items like fine papers, engraved calling cards, gilt-edged books, and gilded picture frames. Even a small amount of shiny detail on a penny postcard made it special.

Of the great many decorative and floral postcards, these ones do show their age. They were more common than their appearance suggest, and the luster that commanded so much attention a century ago has faded. The corners are softened or torn, and the writing is obscured. The background color itself is mottled, scratched, and often reveals an impression of the stamp or cancellation on the reverse. One card has developed a cloudy bloom across the front, just as verdigris slowly encroaches on the hue and texture of copper.

Meant to appear as gold, the metallic substance used was actually bronze powder, which tarnishes, rubs off, and browns with age. Printers were still experimenting with the best approach to reflective ink. As we’ll see, this wasn’t it.

Gilt postcard with white blossoms and red berries on a bronze ground, copyright 1909
Gilt postcard with red and pink geranium blooms on a scratched bronze ground
Gilt postcard with a red rose and a yellow rose on a bronze ground, copyright 1909
Gilt postcard with red and white tulips on a bronze ground
Embossed gilt postcard with red and white carnations on a bronze ground
Gilt postcard with red poppies on a bronze ground
Gilt postcard with red flowers on a tarnished bronze ground

Print shops called this process bronzing. A lithographer first ran the sheet through the press, using a sticky varnish where the shiny effect was wanted. While the varnish stayed tacky, a worker daubed the sheet with fine metal powder. The powder adhered to the wet varnish and fell away from the dry paper around it. A soft brush removed the excess. In the legendary 1880 trade manual, The Grammar of Lithography, bronzing is described among a series of finishing techniques done after the main color printing was complete. The process required a steady hand and a practiced eye. Too little powder left the image looking thin and patchy, and the loose metal dust was a known respiratory contaminant in the print shop.

Bronzing was a specialty trade but it wasn’t particularly rare. In the Heinrich Steinberg printing supply catalog, bronzing ink was offered to lithographers and letterpress printers as a stock item, sold as one option among many inks and materials a working print shop would order regularly. Bronzing was a routine commercial finish, sold as a fancy extra.

Gilt postcard with a pink rose on a scratched bronze ground

Chemists worked on a better recipe for decades. A 1922 German patent described a new formula for mixing metals into lacquer inks. When metallic elements (most often copper and zinc) are added, they lock into a harder, more water-resistant film that oxidize in the air and leaves a slick surface as the ink dries. However, the oxidation that stabilized the lacquer ink is the same process that tarnished the metallic additives. The finely ground metal flakes keep reacting with the oxygen, even over a century.

This cornflower card shows the die-stamped details that give the petals a sculpted, three-dimensional texture. Embossing is a mechanical process done by pressing the card stock between engraved metal plates. Print shops often combined bronzing and embossing for extra visual weight, further pushing a commercial mechanical process to produce an object appreciated for its artistry.

Embossed gilt postcard with blue cornflowers on a bronze ground

Victorian and Edwardian greetings commonly carried rhymed text, including references to well-known verses. Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time begins with the line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…” and “In the desert a fountain is springing…” is adapted from Lord Byron’s 1816 poem Stanzas to Augusta with one word changed. In that era, card publishers borrowed freely, rarely credited the poets, and also employed their own writers to produce the florid messages alongside each bouquet.

The Victorian language of flowers, or floriography, assigned a specific sentiment to each bloom. Violets stood for modesty. Roses meant love, more devoted as the color deepened. A sender might choose a card’s flower to express a tender sentiment, though mailing it as a postcard was no secret. Readers of the period were expected to recognize and decode those meanings inside a new middle-class code of conduct. Sending the right card with the right flower and verse reflected the rules of polite society.

Gilt postcard with purple lilacs and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with a pink chrysanthemum and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with a pink rose and forget-me-nots and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with purple violets and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with a red rose and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with red poppies and a printed verse by Mary Clemmer
Gilt postcard with red geraniums and roses and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with a pink rose and a printed verse from Robert Herrick
Gilt postcard with orange and pink gladiolus and a printed verse
Gilt postcard with purple violets tied in a ribbon and a printed verse

Though bent and tarnished, these postcards are no less charming more than a hundred years later. Some of the shimmer is still there, but the smoky ochre slowly replacing it has its own sort of visual value.

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Pursuits of Happiness

Though the Declaration of Independence reads to some like a guarantee of private liberties, the American pursuit of happiness is a team sport.

John Locke called human choice the engine of happiness, something each person moved toward on their own account. But, when George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration (a predecessor to the national one) he wrote of a people “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” A plural noun doing plural work. The Scottish moralists (widely read in that era) tied happiness to a virtue that can only exists between people, not practiced alone in a room.

Jefferson’s word choice already held two centuries of disagreement. Did happiness belong to the individual as a moral claim to chase? Or did it belong to the commonwealth, something put together like a barn-raising? Historians still argue both sides. Some read the Declaration as entirely Lockean, a document of natural rights. Others see the Scots vision: less about what a person gains, more about what is owed in return. Jefferson wrote a phrase wide enough to hold both, an overlap between our private interests and the social good that framed the dual drives of a new nation.

As I see it, happiness itself is inarguably social, a personal wellbeing tied to others. Try hoarding it, if you wonder. That we need declarations of peace and prosperity is evidence enough. Getting everyone on the same page, so to speak.

But the pursuit of happiness (and the measure of it) stays stubbornly individual. The natural and artistic wonders of a vast world do not arrive at the front door. It requires the drive. The flat open road, the boat out of harbor, the plane in flight, and toward all the dreams beyond–the navigation is always on us.

Large Letter postcards make graphic our search for ourselves and each other. Four cards from the collection illustrate the way.

Washington, D.C. stacks its letters with the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln statue, the White House fountain, the Supreme Court. The statuary of the republic laid out like a garden tour. The walk between buildings, the fountain you sit beside, the steps where a family eats lunch, the institutions and the outing are in the same invitation.

Philadelphia shows Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin’s statue, a colonial rowhouse. The card treats the birth of the country as a place you go, not just a date you memorize. Here you can walk into history on a Wednesday afternoon.

Grand Canyon, Arizona puts Native culture and ancient geology in good relations, with tribal cultures representing the wisdom of people while nature provides the grandeur.

Redwoods of California splits the difference. The large letters are built from tree bark, ridged and red-brown, and the font folds in with the forest behind. Then, a car drives right through the trunk of one letter. Nature and transportation infrastructure occupy the same inch of paper, because by the 1940s they already occupied the same American afternoon.

Today’s collection of 133 large letter postcards is a broad cultural landscape, and the pursuit runs clear to both ends, with a long drive in between. The Capitol dome and the redwood canopy make the same request of a visitor. Show up, and bring someone with you. Look up, and tell the folks at home.

The smaller towns offer the same story at a different scale. A card from Rawlins, Wyoming earnestly calls itself the “Metropolis of the Plains,” packing a courthouse, a garden, and a rail line into a handful of letters for a town of a few thousand people in those days. Topeka spells its name with a church tower, a state capitol, and a sunflower in the corner. Civic pride and natural awe in the same small rectangle. Important most to those who live there, and put on show for far-flung friends and visitors.

The call to each other is what strikes me most. No wonder that roadside murals mimic the large letter design. Packing the car, the long flat highway between stops, the cool breeze from a lookout view. Those fragments gradually form in the personal memories of each traveler. At the same time, the experience often crystallizes at the shoulder of the stranger next to you, squinting in the same afternoon light. 

Thankfully, we still make these excursions 250 years on. Personal experiences expanded in service of functioning society. A happy family vacation, a woodsy writing retreat, a career-changing visit to the National Archives are just a few of my own.

We protect and promote these places not because democracy is functionally fragile or simply symbolic, but because they are the grounding locations for each generation to build the nation in their time. The pursuit of happiness is that continuous movement, home and back.

To Read More

  • Life in Large Letters — The Posted Past essay on the collectors, the publishers, and the design evolution of the form.
  • America250 — the official site of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, with events and initiatives around the July 4, 2026 anniversary.
  • Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection, Newberry Library — the research home of the Curt Teich company’s production files and over 360,000 postcard images, including the bulk of the Large Letter cards ever printed.
  • Jeffrey L. Meikle, Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931–1950 (University of Texas Press, 2015) — the definitive study of the Teich Company’s linen postcards and their place in American visual culture.
  • Lydia Pyne, Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (Bloomsbury, 2021) — a wider cultural history of the postcard as a communication medium, from Victorian craze to modern collectible.
  • Fred Tenney, Large Letter Postcards: The United States — a collector’s reference guide cataloging Large Letter cards by state, a standard resource for deltiologists working this specific niche.

History’s Holdings

Holding onto history takes at least two of us.

Each of us hangs onto the bits and pieces of our own stories, and sometimes we write them down or snap a photo. Memories we share between family and friends get saved on phones, tucked away in drawers, and tossed into boxes. Shuffling through old memories is a way to stay in touch with ourselves, our people, and our past from time to time. On my loneliest days, sitting amidst these postcards, I have everywhere to turn.

The family collection is well into the six digits in terms of volume and value. Neatly ordered albums, they are sometimes curated by geography or theme. A few also left untidy, just as one should never leave a page blank at night.

Once, I asked Dad why he collected them.

“For you,” he said.

I’m certain he meant us.

A postcard of a building that has been torn down is worth more than one of a building that still stands. I like that logic. The building is gone. The card remains. Suddenly it is not a souvenir. It becomes a rare record, and a potent place to put other remembrances.

Who is responsible for these palettes of history? Museums, libraries, archives. Institutions, we tend to think. They are built for it, with catalogued and climate-controlled cases. Open to registered researchers on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

But history first accumulates in attics, basements, and estate sales. Boxes get donated, dispersed, sold, or simply lost. Private collectors have always been a first line of preservation. They stalk the sales looking for bargains, and more.

Dad was one, and he made this collection a life’s work far beyond his profession. Turns out, I have to follow these clues, too. Probably genetic.

New this month, our fresh retro designs are for sale at Hackett House in downtown Tempe. Built in 1888, the oldest fired brick building in Tempe, it’s now the home of an Arizona-themed gift shop. Hackett House also serves as headquarters for Tempe Sister Cities, a group dedicated to shrinking the distance between people across the world. Postcards have always been in that business. Read more about Tempe’s postcard history at Tempe in Time.

A retro-looking postcard of a desert landscape and a lemon tree that reads Greetings from Arizona and your friends at The Posted Past.

Another big shift is coming this summer. The Posted Past is moving our image collection database in-house. What began as an experimental eBay site is turning into curated collections of rare postcards presented with provenance. My essays give the cards historical and cultural context. You, lovely readers, renew them with memory and meaning. Thank you!

Every Wednesday, I publish an essay about a rare postcard or set. Most have been a brief but detailed description of the postcards as objects, along with anything I might surmise from the evidence or lack of it.

Now with some trusted AI support, I am able to catalogue and query those images at a technical level never before possible. As suspected, the new capacities make me work harder as a writer and researcher, and greatly motivate my interests. Also, the image metadata extends The Posted Past’s reach, especially the alt text.

It’s an expanded aim as I stay on mission to trade loneliness for connection, and find the right places to put the history we hold.

Sepia RPPC of military and civilian dignitaries gathered on a train platform between two carriages, with a row of soldiers in dress uniform standing at attention at right. Antwerp, 1920 Summer Olympics.
Dignitaries and honor guard at an Antwerp train station, 1920 Summer Olympics.

FROM THE RARITIES ROOM

Precipice of Peace: Postcards from the 1920 Antwerp Olympics
Eighteen RPPCs from a Games held in a city still clearing rubble from the First World War. Athletes from a world trying to remember what peace felt like.

Healing Ward
A matched pair of British WWI RPPCs showing a military hospital ward at Christmas, circa 1915–1918. Paired cards from this period are uncommon. Someone kept them together for more than a century.

Susanna’s Suitors
Fröken Susanna Pettersson of Sunnansjö, Sweden received romantic postcards in 1903. She kept them. We have them. Her name, her village, her suitors — all of it intact. Personal provenance.

Shakespearean Soap
In the 1880s, someone decided Shakespeare had the perfect verse for selling soap. The Dobbins’ Electric Soap Shakespeare set is a named Victorian trade card series with documented manufacturer and known print run. Material culture, advertising history, and print history, all in one small set.

Trade Card Tricks
Three cards slipped into a box of laundry powder in 1882. The Victorian collecting impulse worked then, and it still does. This essay traces what those three cards reveal about the era that produced them.

The Last Summer
A Hoenisch photogravure portrait of composer Edvard Grieg at Troldhaugen, dated July 25, 1907. Six weeks after this photograph was made, Grieg was gone. The card is a named subject, a documented location, a specific date. Where should it stay forever?

RMS Berengaria
The story of a mail-carrying ship named after a queen who never arrived. This postcard sits at the intersection of maritime history, social history, and the mechanics of moving correspondence across an ocean.

Lens on Coblenz, 1918
A Swedish-German photography team documented America’s occupation of Coblenz after World War I. The RPPCs are rare on their own terms. The photographers — a married couple — makes this story come alive.

Coblenz Continued
After the first Coblenz essay published, research revealed more. The trove is larger and the record of the postwar occupation continues to grow.

RMS Berengaria

The story of a mail-carrying ship named after a queen who never arrived.

RARE CARD

Art Deco promotional postcard, printed in U.S.A., circa 1923

Front: A bold Art Deco illustration in four colors: burnt amber, deep navy, black, and red-orange. The ship Berengaria fills the frame. The black hull dominates the lower half. Three banded funnels plume smoky blue-purple into the amber sky. The ship’s name is lettered in copper on the hull. The Cunard lion sits in a red medallion at upper left. At lower left, a stylized New York skyline recedes into amber, a bridge suggested behind it. The waves are geometric. The image mirrors a popular poster style, compressed into an elongated postcard.

Reverse: The left panel carries a printed ship description: 919 feet, 52,022 gross tons, Pompeian swimming pool, gymnasium, Turkish and electric baths, special ballroom. Divided format, publisher code A. & P. 47850, printed in the U.S.A. The address side is blank. The card was never sent.

“The R.M.S. Berengaria, the largest ship in the Cunard fleet and one of the three largest ships in the world, has a length of 919 feet, and a tonnage of 52,022 gross tons. Her passenger accommodation includes a Pompeian swimming pool, gymnasium, Turkish and electric baths, and a special ballroom.”

Production: Cunard distributed promotional postcards like this one aboard ship and at its offices. This example uses offset lithography with a guilloche-style mechanical tint screen giving it the graphic quality of a travel poster. The colors are rich and regal. The card shows its age: deep crease lines, foxing, staining, with a bent lower left corner.

Collectibility: Ship postcards from the great transatlantic liners are a well-established collecting category. The Berengaria appears frequently. This example stands out for its Art Deco illustrative style over the more common photographic format. The design quality is high, but condition limits its value.

Back of RMS Berengaria Cunard Line promotional postcard, circa 1921–1938. Divided back format, printed in U.S.A., publisher A. & P. 47850. Left panel carries printed ship description: 919 feet, 52,022 gross tons, Pompeian swimming pool, gymnasium, Turkish and electric baths, special ballroom. Address side blank. Unposted.
RMS Berengaria, Cunard Line postcard — reverse. Publisher A. & P. no. 47850, printed in U.S.A.

Samuel Cunard began his shipping empire on a government mail contract in 1839. As a Royal Mail Ship, the RMS prefix was baked into Cunard’s identity from the start. It meant a contractual obligation to carry post, and to sail on schedule whether the ship was full or nearly empty. Cunard told his captains: “Ship, passengers and mail — bring them safely over, and safely back.”

The ship’s name came from a medieval English queen. Berengaria of Navarre married Richard the Lionheart in Cyprus during a Crusade, was widowed without an heir, and spent her remaining decades in Le Mans petitioning by letter for the pension King John refused to pay. She appealed to popes and argued with bishops. Her entire widowhood was conducted through correspondence, written from afar, addressed to courts that largely ignored her. She is most remembered as the English queen who never set foot in England.

The ship started out as the SS Imperator, built in Hamburg for the Hamburg America Line and launched in 1912 as the largest passenger ship in the world. The war intervened and the ship was seized as a reparation and sailed briefly as a U.S. Navy transport. In 1921, it was renamed Berengaria and handed to Cunard. Much like its namesake, the ship never returned to its homeland.

The Berengaria served as Cunard’s flagship through the 1920s, then declined into Prohibition-dodging cruises that passengers nicknamed Bargainaria. Aging wiring sparked electrical fires. Cunard retired the vessel in 1938.

Sir John Jarvis, a Surrey MP, bought Berengaria for scrap and sent her to the River Tyne in a deliberate act of charity. Jarrow had lost its main shipyard, Palmer’s, in 1934. Unemployment topped 70 percent. Two years before the Berengaria arrived, 200 of Jarrow’s men had marched 300 miles to London to petition Parliament for work. Parliament offered nothing. Jarvis purchased the Berengaria and the Olympic to give the town’s idle shipyard workers something to dismantle. Men who had built destroyers and passenger liners cut the ship apart with blowtorches. The work was interrupted by the Second World War, but the last of the ship was gone in 1946.

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Trade Card Tricks

Three cards were slipped into a box of laundry powder in 1882. Someone kept them. The Victorian collecting impulse worked then, and it still does.

These three Victorian trade cards were issued in 1882 by J.D. Larkin & Co. of Buffalo, New York, and printed by Cosack & Co., one of the most accomplished chromolithography firms in the country at the time. Two cards advertise Boraxine, a borax-based laundry powder; the third promotes Creme Oatmeal Toilet Soap. Premiums slipped into product packages, these trade cards were designed to be collected.

Though selling soap and cleaning powder, none of the three shows domestic labor. Instead, each presents an aspirational female figure representing a Victorian version of beauty, cleanliness, and high design. The cards are notable for the printing mastery, expensive gilding, and their confident use of Aesthetic Movement and Japonisme design conventions.

Both the Larkin Company and Cosack & Co. went on to significant histories. Buffalo’s industrial power in that era were remarkable, and the craft of chromolithography was at its height. The cards survive as evidence of the Gilded Age and still hold their value a century later.

Three chromolithograph trade cards, J.D. Larkin & Co. / Cosack & Co., Buffalo, N.Y., 1882

Chromolithography had transformed commercial advertising in the decade following the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The technique required drawing each color separately onto a flat limestone plate, then passing the paper through the press once per color, building the image in successive transparent layers. A finished card of this complexity required a dozen or more passes. The result was a depth and saturation of color that earlier printing processes could not achieve.

Cosack & Co. was among the firms that defined the standard. Founded in Buffalo in 1864 by Hugh Clay and Herman Cosack, the firm described itself as “The Most Complete Lithographic Establishment in the United States” and maintained offices in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Hartford, and Boston. Buffalo’s position at the intersection of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal made it a center for manufacturing and commerce. Printing follows industry, and the company produced trade cards, baseball cards, railroad promotions, Civil War memorial prints, and sporting prints.

None of the three cards depicts domestic work. The women shown are not laundering, scrubbing, or cleaning. Victorian soap manufacturers consistently presented their products through images of the comfort and refinement that cleanliness was understood to produce, rather than images of the labor it required. Cleanliness carried significant moral and social weight in this era. Advertising positioned soap not merely as a cleaning agent but as a indicator of respectable domestic life.

Boraxine was Larkin’s second product, introduced shortly after the company’s founding in 1875. Its advertising copy addressed practical concerns obliquely, but the trade cards operated on a different value system. The cards were premium collectibles in the trade card collection craze that preceded postcards. Their purpose was to be kept, collected, and admired as objects themselves.

The collectible strategy belonged to Elbert Hubbard, Larkin’s brother-in-law and advertising partner from 1878 onward. Hubbard recognized that inserting a chromolithograph into a box of laundry powder gave the customer a reason to purchase routinely. The marketing strategy was driven by the collecting impulse and was itself an object that affirmed the class status of buyers.

In 1885, Hubbard formalized this approach into what he called “The Larkin Idea”. Factory direct sales with valuable premiums bundled into combination boxes at the original price of the soap. The strategy transformed Larkin from a regional manufacturer into one of the largest mail-order businesses in the country, eventually employing 4,000 people with annual sales of $28 million. In 1903, Larkin commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a headquarters building on Seneca Street. It was Wright’s first commercial commission, completed in 1906.

The Victorian trade card era ran from roughly 1876 to the late 1890s, when improvements in magazine color printing reduced the novelty and the format declined. At its peak in the 1880s, trade cards were the most prevalent form of advertising in American commercial life. They were distributed at store counters, tucked into product packages, and carried by traveling salesmen. The collecting culture around them was substantial. Parlor albums were produced specifically to hold them, and publications offered guidance on arrangement and display.

Cosack & Co. continued operating under successive partnerships through the early twentieth century. The Larkin Company closed in the 1940s. Sadly, the Larkin Administration Building was demolished in 1950.

These 1882 cards predate “The Larkin Idea” by three years. The contemporary collecting impulse that Hubbard designed them to provoke also preserved them for more than a century. These three cards survive because they were kept long after the product was gone. They are evidence of a printing firm, a soap company, and a city at a confident moment when quality communication was rightly presumed to outlast its commercial purpose.

To Read More

The Larkin Company — Buffalo Stories Archives offers solid documentation of Larkin’s rise, buffalostories.com

Chromolithography and Trade Cards — The Winterthur Museum holds one of the foremost collections of Victorian trade cards and published research on lithography production, digitalcollections.winterthur.org

The Larkin Administration Building — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation maintains records of the 1903 building, demolished in 1950, franklloydwright.org

Borax in the 1880s — The Borax/Death Valley history is well documented at the Borax Museum, Furnace Creek, California, nps.gov/deva

“The Larkin Idea” — The Henry Ford Museum blog tells this story, thehenryford.org

Herman T. Koerner and Cosack & Co. — Western New York History is a good source for more, wnyhistory.org

Trade Cards — A Short History at Cornell University, Waxman Collection, rmc.library.cornell.edu

Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Missouri Press, 1987.

Jay T. Last, The Colour Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography. Hillcrest Press, 2005.

Spring Cleaning

A path appears underfoot every year around this time, with a slight softening of the ground and a change in the light. The road is old, but the way is new again.

Spring equinox arrives in just a few days, another moment when day and night stand in perfect balance. Nowruz, one of the world’s oldest celebrations, falls on the equinox itself, marking the moment the earth turns toward renewal. Observed for at least three thousand years across Persia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the diaspora communities that carry it around the world, Nowruz means new day and it begins precisely at the moment of the spring equinox.

Preparations are meticulous. The house is cleaned from top to bottom in a practice called khane-tekani, shaking out the house, to release the accumulated weight of winter. A ceremonial table is set with sprouted wheat for rebirth, vinegar for patience, garlic for health, and a goldfish in a bowl for life against all odds.

In Chinese Lunar New Year, it is the year of the horse. All the teachings of Ramadan have been quietly observed this month. Christians are entering the heart of Lent, when liturgical colors shift from penitential purple to radiant rose, and the invitation is to rejoice. World traditions share this central wisdom. To walk forward, one must first prepare.

This morning my path runs along Sligo Creek near Washington DC, where the trail follows the water through an old urban forest. The snowdrops are done. Small and white and brave, they came and went in February. Crocuses are finishing now, purple and yellow scattered through the leaf litter. Daffodils line the path in both directions to proclaim the news of spring. Soon the cherry blossoms will arrive, carrying the Japanese mono no aware, bittersweet awareness as beautiful things pass.

For the next few weeks I’ll be traveling. Away from my desk and the collection. Being in motion feels at pace with the season. By early April I’ll be back in Arizona, where spring doesn’t linger the way it does in the East. The desert has its own brief, vivid version of the season. Sharp early light and cool mornings, palo verdes going yellow and the brittlebush blazing.

For me, it’s a time to toss off the heavy winter blankets, move furniture, dust out the corners, and feel all the motivations of the season. The Posted Past is making some new moves, too.

Spring greeting cards are full of flowers and fancy, and the messages give us gentle permission to start again. If you are grass-side up, count yourself among the living and the hopeful. Believe that what comes next might be better.

Take a walk this week, if you can. Clear an old task you’ve been putting off. Set the table. Notice what’s arising in your life. Greet the new day.

Lucky Us

Romans advised that fortune favors the bold. In Sweden, luck never gives, it only lends. In the United States, the harder you work, the luckier you get. The Arabic proverb says, “Throw a lucky man into the sea and he’ll come up with a fish in his mouth.” A Brit might be lucky at cards, unlucky in love. In Japan, the day you decide to act is your lucky day. 

Edwardian postcards had a curious set of symbols to call forth fate and fortune. Horseshoes, shamrocks, roses, and playing cards. Small and slightly worn at the edges, these vintage greeting postcards have traveled more than a century carrying a providential wish.

Only one card in the collection actually says Good Luck. The rest offer best wishes, happy hours, and kind thoughts from me to you. As we’ll see, luck is borne of relationships (and circumstances) lifted by the charitable wish for health, wealth, and wisdom.

Some say that luck can be earned, but only a fool pursues it outright. We daydream about what fortunes may be in store, and sometimes ignore the simple sparkles that appear each day. We know, of course, that there are no free lunches. Yet, we are admonished to never look a gift horse in the mouth.

The bold assume they earned their lucky breaks. The humble suspect they’ve borrowed fortune temporarily. The superstitious are not entirely sure we should discuss it. Luck is where fate and intent find common cause, usually in the context of close friendships.

Old English had no luck. It used wyrd instead, which pointed to fate and destiny. Wyrd is the root of our word weird, which may indicate how people felt about fate. It was uncanny, inevitable, and perhaps divine. You didn’t pursue wyrd. You experienced it through awe and fear.

Somewhere around the 15th century, luk and gelucke drifted in from the Dutch and Low German. Luck was looser and more manual. Like weather, luck favored preparation and was possible to influence if you knew the right charms. The horseshoe went up above the door. The rock went in your pocket. If luck is not fate, if it is not fixed in advance, then perhaps you can do something about it. Perhaps it can be courted.

The lucky person is not the one who waits but the one who steps into the room. This is luck as a reward for courage, or at least for motion. Fate deals the cards, and we each have a hand to play.

Fortune favors the bold — fortes fortuna adiuvat
~ Terence, Roman playwright, around 151 BCE

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and preparation is something you control. The solo pursuit of fortune is a genuine drive.

The harder I work, the luckier I get.
~ Samuel Goldwyn

But the shamrock gently disagrees. Four-leaf clovers are natural anomalies, not personal achievements. We can’t earn one, only discover it. Even if you can court luck, even if work and boldness can pull it toward you, it is never yours to fully command.

Luck never gives; it only lends.
~ Swedish proverb

Some people simply have it, inexplicably, in ways that have nothing to do with preparation or boldness or a rabbit’s foot.

Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth.
~ Arabic proverb

Some observe that luck is a finite resource and can be unwisely traded away. This may or may not be true, but as a matter of human priority it is clarifying. We each get chances to test our luck.

Lucky at cards, unlucky in love.
~ English proverb

The tension between fate and will, between earned luck and divine luck, is located in a moment of commitment. The lucky day is not the day something falls in your favor. It is the day you decide it might be worth the effort.

The day you decide to do it is your lucky day.
~ Japanese proverb

Whatever the senders intended and however the recipients replied, these cards demonstrate how providential language holds us together in anticipation of something wonderful just ahead. The possibility that things might go our way.

The symbols of luck nested together in relationship, in abundance, in the living world — a horseshoe wreathed in flowers, overflowing with roses, or flanked by shamrocks — is not an accident of Victorian design sensibility. It draws on the ancient wisdom that friends are the true source of life’s lucky breaks. Love does the work and luck gets the credit.

Shakespearean Soap

In the 1880s, someone figured Shakespeare had the perfect verse for selling soap.

Rare Cards ~ Seven Victorian Trade Cards Selling Dobbins’ Electric Soap

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jacques delivers his monologue in Act II, Scene VII, observing human life with world-weary detachment. He sketches out seven distinct chapters of a human life, from mewling infancy to toothless old age, with equal parts affection and irony. One of the most quoted passages in all of Shakespeare, by the 1880s it was deeply embedded in popular culture — the kind of verse that some households knew by heart.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Dobbins’ Electric Soap was manufactured by I. L. Cragin & Co. of Philadelphia and had been on the market since the mid-1860s. By the early 1880s, the company was advertising heavily through trade cards, chromolithographic collectibles that matched the indulgences of the Gilded Age. Cragin’s innovation was to produce not a single card but a series of seven that required the collector to buy a bar of soap each time. Get the certificate from your grocer, and the full set arrived by mail free of charge.

Philly, 1880s. Shakespeare meets laundry.

Front: Each card is a vivid chromolithograph on a warm gold ground with a bold red border, a consistent visual identity that makes the cards a set. The figures are drawn in a coarse comic style, expressive and exaggerated, with each character placed in a domestic or outdoor scene with a bar of Dobbins soap nearby.

First, a round-faced nurse in a white mobcap seated in a rocking chair, holding a squirming naked infant over a washbasin. Card Two shows a sulky schoolboy in a red jacket and yellow-green plaid knickerbockers, satchel over one shoulder. The lover on Card Three is a lanky figure in a gold waistcoat and plaid trousers, leaning against a bureau in a disheveled bedroom.

The soldier on Card Four is wild-haired and red-faced, bent over a green barrel-tub in his uniform trousers and braces, and a sword against the wall behind him. Card Five presents a rotund man in a blue coat, leaning back in his chair with the serene self-satisfaction of someone accustomed to receiving gifts. Card Six is an elderly Harlequin figure in a polka-dotted costume with red stockings, tumbling in mid-air. The final card is a woman in a yellow apron leaning over a green wooden tub, and a billowing human figure made entirely of suds.

Reverse: Black text on cream stock with the full Shakespeare speech across all seven cards, each picking up the verse where the last left off. The final card identifies the source: As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

Below the verse, each card runs a version of the same offer in slightly varied language: collect a grocer’s certificate for each bar purchased and mail seven of them to 116 South 4th Street, Philadelphia. Without the certificate, the price for the set is 25 cents.

Each card presents a few product features: no wash boiler, no rubbing board, no house full of steam. Card Four warns against unscrupulous imitations and instructs buyers to ask for Dobbins’ Electric Soap by name. The printer’s imprint for Chas. Shields’ Sons, 20 & 22 Gold Street, New York appears at the foot of each reverse.

Production: These high-quality commercial chromolithographs likely date to the early 1880s, after the business had been in operation for more than a decade. The color registration is precise throughout, the figure work confident and expressive, and the gold-and-red palette gives the set a unified identity that still reads as a coherent series. The illustration style and rich production values mirror the opulent aspirations of the era.

Collectibility: Complete sets of themed trade card series are uncommon; most were distributed individually and rarely survived intact. The Shakespeare framework, the quality of the printing, and the conceptual ambition of the campaign make this set particularly distinctive. It appeals to trade card collectors, Victorian advertising historians, Shakespeare enthusiasts, and ephemera collectors with a taste for the literary and the delightfully absurd.

new Rarities Room

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