Postcard Sets – The Posted Past

From Here to There

Sometime in the 1980s, a family on North Magnolia in Santee, California, received an oil change reminder in the mail. Postwar housing tracts had filled in the San Diego suburb and a car was not optional. As much as new hot rods were in style, it was a nostalgic moment for vintage automobiles.

The card from John Horsman’s Chevron station showed a 1908 Benz. Drew Ford in La Mesa sent another with a 1911 Coey Flyer. On the back: a service reminder. Your oil is due. Come in soon.

Vintage dealer trade postcard front, 1911 Coey Flyer antique automobile, natural color postcard by Dexter Press — 1911 Coey Flyer

The cards arrived with calculated regularity. Each addressed to the same house, each featuring a different antique automobile on the front. Curated from private collections and museums, these postcards were reproduced by the millions as stock advertising for companies across the country. Depicting automobiles from a bygone era, the trade cards themselves were designed to be collectible.

Vintage dealer trade postcard, antique automobile at Pikes Peak Ghost Town Colorado Springs, featuring 1903 Cadillac, 1908 Maxwell and 1904 Zimmerman — 1903 Cadillac, 1908 Maxwell, 1904 Zimmerman

Vintage dealer trade postcard front, 1926 Franklin Boattail Roadster Model 11-A antique automobile, owned by Ed Midura Chicopee Falls Massachusetts — 1903 Cadillac, 1908 Maxwell, 1904 Zimmerman

The man most responsible for preserving those automobiles was born in Venice, California, in 1911. Bill Harrah opened a bingo parlor there as a young man, moved to Reno in 1937, and built a casino empire that made him one of the wealthiest men in Nevada. He was meticulous about his clothes, his restaurants, and especially his cars.

His first collector car was a 1911 Maxwell, and Harrah bought, restored, and accumulated automobiles for the rest of his life. He acquired Winthrop Rockefeller’s extensive collection for $947,000, including 68 motorized vehicles and three horse-drawn carriages in a single transaction. It was a passion he pursued, and almost couldn’t contain.

By 1962, Harrah rented a huge brick building in Sparks to display around 150 cars. The cars moved in convoys. His mechanics restored them to running condition. When the restorations were finished, they test-drove the vehicles up and down Glendale Boulevard in Sparks, sometimes dressed in the clothing of the era.

The Harrah’s postcards in this set were produced from his collection’s photographs, shot when the restoration program was at its height. A glass company in Detroit printed them. An auto glass distributor in Phoenix mailed them to customers in the state. Though lovingly housed in Sparks, this 1913 Garford traveled through the postal system to Prescott, Arizona, tucked into a stack of bills and circulars.

The collection eventually spread across thirteen warehouses. His executive Lloyd Dyer put it plainly, “We owned thirteen hundred automobiles at that time. Bill wanted to have a perfect museum to show his cars.”

Harrah never finished that museum. He died in 1978. Holiday Inn purchased his hotels, casinos, and automobile collection in 1980 and announced plans to sell everything. Harrah friends and fans pushed back hard. Holiday Inn agreed to donate 175 cars if money could be raised for a museum.

The National Automobile Museum opened in downtown Reno on November 5, 1989, and is still operating with more than 225 cars on display. That gift became the largest corporate philanthropic donation in the nation’s history at the time.

Vintage advertising postcard front, 1903 Thomas Tonneau automobile, photographed at Harrah's Automobile Collection, Reno, Nevada — 1903 Thomas Tonneau

Vintage trade postcard front, 1933 Franklin Custom Pirate Phaeton second view, Harrah's Automobile Collection Reno Nevada — 1903 Thomas Tonneau

In a small Michigan town called Hickory Corners, another collector built a museum for different reasons. Donald S. Gilmore ran the Upjohn Company, the pharmaceutical firm his family had founded in Kalamazoo in 1886. As the story goes, one day his wife told him he needed a hobby. Most people know what that means.

She gave him his first project car in 1963 as a retirement gift, a 1920 Pierce-Arrow. Within three years he had accumulated 37 cars, a steamboat, a steam tractor, and a biplane.

Eventually, he bought a farm up the road and the Gilmore Car Museum opened to the public on July 31, 1966, with 35 cars on display. That farm now covers 90 acres. The museum exhibits over 400 vehicles and motorcycles from all eras in several vintage buildings. A staggering scale for an effort that began because a his wife wanted him out of the house.

Then there’s Burton H. Upjohn, whose name appears on the backs of multiple cards in this collection. From a different branch of the same Kalamazoo family, he collected cars of his own. In the cards we see here, he loaned the 1908 Packard, 1911 Empire Racy Roadster, and the 1931 Ford Model A to Henry Clark for photography.

Henry Austin Clark Jr. started buying cars at Harvard in the late 1930s. After naval service during World War II, he and family settled in Southampton, New York, into a life of collecting, rallies and tours. The cars outgrew his sheds. He opened the Long Island Automotive Museum in 1948, in large part to house his collection.

He also photographed nearly every notable collector car in America. That’s not quite an exaggeration. Clark comprehensively and precisely documented a vanishing world with attention to what would matter later. He co-authored the Standard Catalog of American Cars with Beverly Rae Kimes. He participated in Glidden Tours for decades. He served as vice president of the Bridgehampton race circuit. He rescued the Thomas Flyer that won the 1908 New York-to-Paris race from a junkyard.

By the late 1970s, the museum’s operating losses forced him to begin selling. In 1979, over two hundred automobiles were auctioned. A year later, the museum closed. Clark died on December 15, 1991, the day after his collection of automotive history began to move to the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford in Dearborn.

Vintage museum postcard front, 1966 Duesenberg Sedan Model D prototype 8-cylinder body by Ghia, Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum, photography by Nicky Wright — 1966 Duesenberg Sedan (Prototype)

Vintage museum postcard front, 1937 Cord Beverly Sedan Model 812 8-cylinder front drive, Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum, photography by Nicky Wright — 1966 Duesenberg Sedan (Prototype)

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum opened in 1974 after community leaders and volunteers spent years raising funds to restore the company’s old showroom and factory in Auburn, Indiana. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in 2005. It holds the cars photographed by Nicky Wright for the 1991 postcard set in this collection.

A network of institutions now hold what these private collectors assembled, including the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, The Henry Ford in Dearborn, the Revs Institute in Naples, the Gilmore in Hickory Corners, and the LeMay in Tacoma.

We can see in this collection where the credit lines overlap. These men likely knew each other, and certainly inhabited a postwar American world of inherited wealth, mechanical passion, and enough acreage to store what they acquired. Though the original collectors have passed, the images, trade cards, archives, museums, and the cars themselves are evidence of an American pastime that lives on today.

To Read More

National Automobile Museum (The Harrah Collection), Reno, Nevada — automuseum.org

Gilmore Car Museum, Hickory Corners, Michigan — gilmorecarmuseum.org

Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, Auburn, Indiana — automobilemuseum.org

Henry Austin Clark Jr. Photograph Collection, The Henry Ford — thehenryford.org

“The Pioneers of Automobile Collecting,” Seal Cove Auto Museum — sealcoveautomuseum.org

Henry Austin Clark, Society of Automotive Historians — autohistory.org

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.

Healing Ward

British WWI Hospital Ward RPPCs, a rare paired set, circa 1915–1918

These two real photo postcards document a British auxiliary hospital ward decorated for Christmas, sometime between 1915 and 1918. They are unused and in remarkably good condition. Together they form a matched pair, shot on the same day from opposite ends of the same large convalescence hall.

The architecture, nursing uniforms, iron bed frames, style of celebration, and the back of the cards all point to the same conclusion: a British ward during wartime Christmas, shot by a local photographer working with the same technical materials and conditions as those documented in well-respected the Wellcome Collection in London.

Front of Postcards

The room is large with high ceilings and tall windows running along both sides. Hardwood floors extend the full length of the ward. Iron-framed hospital beds line each wall in neat rows, their white linens crisp and turned. A series of small tables anchor the center aisle, dressed with lace edges and set with tiered decorations, small ornamental figures, and floral arrangements. Crepe paper garlands radiate among the hanging fixtures from the center toward the walls. Nurses in white dresses, bibbed aprons, and distinctive white caps stand at intervals among the beds. Male patients rest in several of the beds or sit up for the photograph.

The first card was shot from one end of the room, looking toward a grand arched window fitted with ornate leaded stained glass and flanking panels in a geometric floral pattern. The second shot looks back the other direction toward an interior archway.

The photographic quality of both cards is high. The tonal range is continuous, with a fine grain and deeply resolved shadows. The nurses in the first image are grouped more loosely near the central table, and a ghostly motion blur in their figures suggests a longer exposure time. The second image is darker and the poses are more formal.

Back of Postcards

The cards share the same markings on the reverse, confirming they came from the same stock and photographer. The back carries the words “Post Card” in a decorative serif typeface, and a clean t-shaped dividing line delineating spaces “For Correspondence” and “Address Only.” No stamp box, printer’s imprint, paper manufacturer mark, or country or origin. That makes this RPPC irrefutably British.

Britain pioneered the divided postcard back in 1902, five years before the United States adopted the format. American RPPCs of the same era almost universally carried manufacturer’s marks such as AZO or VELOX in a printed stamp box, used to identify the photographic paper brand. British cards of this period carried no such mark. The back of these cards places their manufacture firmly in the British tradition.

The absence of any commercial marker further suggests a staff or commercial photographer and local production. These were not mass-produced. They were made in small numbers, likely for official wartime documentation or as personal mementos of a meaningful Christmas.

Two complementary long shots on a memorable day. Paired RPPCs are less common. A matched set intact, from a wartime context more than a century later, is rarer still.

Wartime Convalescence

Britain entered the First World War in August 1914 with 297 trained military nurses. Nowhere near enough for what was coming. Within weeks, the Royal Army Medical Corps and the British Red Cross Society jointly activated the Voluntary Aid Detachment system, mobilizing thousands of civilian volunteers to staff a network of auxiliary hospitals across the country. By 1918, approximately 80,000 VAD members served in uniform. Twelve thousand worked directly in military hospitals. Sixty thousand staffed auxiliary hospitals of various kinds.

The buildings pressed into service ranged from country houses and public schools to civic halls and converted warehouses. The ward in these cards show Gothic Revival arched windows with Arts and Crafts stained glass. The architecture is distinguished with high ceilings and dark wood wainscoting. Perhaps this is a purpose-built civic or private building of Edwardian ambition, converted for wartime use.

The iron bed frames visible in these cards match the tubular iron hospital beds documented in the ward photographs of King George Hospital, the largest military hospital in Britain during the war. Converted from a newly built HM Stationery Office warehouse on Stamford Street, London, the hospital opened in May 1915 and treated some 71,000 men before closing in June 1919. The Wellcome Collection holds its ward photographs. They show the same head and foot rail design, the same lightweight iron construction, the same configuration of beds along the ward walls. This was standard British military hospital specification, and these cards meet it exactly.

Wartime Wardrobe

We can more precisely date these cards by the white caps worn by the nurses. By early 1915, untrained VAD nursing staff had begun adopting the triangular floating veil worn by trained military nurses. Professional nurses were already unhappy about working alongside civilian volunteers. By November 1915, the Joint War Committee introduced a standardized cap for VAD nurses, making distinctions of training and rank visible at a glance.

The caps in these cards match that post-1915 VAD style. They are not the earlier flat cap prior to 1915, nor the fully structured veil of the trained QAIMNS sister. The confidence of the nurses’ poses and the scale of the ward celebration suggest an established wartime routine rather than the improvised urgency of the war’s first Christmas. This may narrow the date to 1916, 1917, or 1918.

Wellcome’s Wartime Collection

The Wellcome Collection’s photographic holdings of The King George Hospital archives open a window onto wartime convalescence. From the start, its philosophy held that recovery from war’s trauma demanded more than medicine.

Each bed had an electric light and a pink and white quilt. Common rooms on each floor were set up for socializing, smoking, reading, and writing letters. A miniature Harrods-like gift shop kept the wards stocked with comforts to necessities. It ordered up to 60,000 cigarettes each week so every patient could have six or seven smokes a day.

Most remarkably, a Royal Academician designed a rooftop garden that eventually held 24 revolving shelters positioned so patients could take in the air and watch the River Thames in all weathers. Queen Alexandra visited in May 1915, and that September she sent the hospital a tripod telescope so patients could study the rooftop view across London. On Christmas Day 1916, King George V and Queen Mary toured every ward in person, and presented each patient with a copy of the Queen’s Gift Book.

The decorated ward in these postcards belongs to that same time period, patriotic conviction, and palliative approach. The lace tablecloth, tiered cake stands, crepe paper garlands, and nurses standing at attention in their best uniforms were elements of organized care for men who had survived the Western Front, deserved a memorable Christmas, and needed more than the doctor’s orders.

History of King George Hospital at Lost Hospitals of London

Scarlet Finders research on VAD uniform dating guide

The British Red Cross and auxiliary hospitals during the First World War

Historic Hospitals on the broader history of auxiliary hospital use

Detailed guide to British military nursing services during the Great War

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.

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Return Flights

Mai’s brothers check-in and George follows up. Nina and Tom find Delia’s postcard stash, and their way home. Nora knows her way around town now. Peace is in practice, not perfect circumstances, says Mrs. Hanabusa.

Careful block letters adorned the outside of a #10 envelope. George recognized Jack’s handwriting. Precise, old-fashioned, like an architect from a bygone era. Inside, George found a letter to addressed to him, and a long list of books Jack had read. Not just titles, but notes.

The Hidden Life of Trees – I like how roots connect underground.

The Mapmakers – Bird migrations mapped with ocean currents.

A Sand County Almanac – The geese made me cry.

George sat at his kitchen table, poured over the letter twice, then kept going back to it in mild wonder. The boy was thirteen. Reading natural philosophy at a level twice his age and writing elegant, matter-of-fact prose.

George now had a collection of postcards just for his grandson. He kept an eye out for anything inspired by books, libraries, explorers, architecture, and history. But today, he had a different one in mind.

Jack – Your list made my week! You remind me why books matter. Keep reading, all of life is in there. – Grandpa

George bundled up and trudged to the mailbox in the extremely cold and icy January morning. Stood there a moment, breath visible in the air, so proud of a thirteen-year-old boy who cried over geese.

The phone rang Saturday afternoon. It was Mai.

“Dad? You busy?”

“Never too busy. What’s up?”

“So—weird thing. I heard from both Derek and Marcus this week, within a day of each other.”

George set down his coffee. Mai’s brothers were also adopted from the chaos in Laos, but by different families. Mai didn’t know or remember much as a child. They’d reconnected as young adults as they discovered their shared histories. George had met Mai’s brothers only three times, at each of their weddings. Derek, the oldest, spent his early years in an orphanage before his adoption. He now runs a tech business in Palo Alto. Marcus, the youngest, grew up in a musical family and plays professional brass in traveling shows.

“That’s wonderful. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, they’re fine. Both texted out of the blue. Derek asked about the kids, Marcus asked about you. I think they’re feeling their age,” Mai chuckled.

After they hung up, George sat at his table looking at his postcard stacks. He found a San Francisco classic for Derek, and an old club card from Illinois for Marcus. Relics from a jazzier time. Same short notes to both of them.

Mai says you’re doing well. Glad to hear it! – George

Nina loaded into her car early Sunday morning. Coffee in a thermos, bag full of stuff, and Mrs. Hanabusa’s advice in her head. Leave room. Her mind drifted for most of the drive, watching the sunrise over the desert and mountains to the East. She took the old road through Florence for just that reason.

Nina climbed the stairs in the worn, beige apartment complex, and knocked.

Tom opened the door looking nervous. “Hi. Come in.”

Nina noticed immediately, he was making an effort. Coffee brewing, store-bought pastries on a plate, magazines and mail in piles recently cleared from the couch. Seemed like he intended to inhabit the place, not just occupy space.

The talk was halted at first, then easier. Nina found it so strange that she grew up with the man and knew him not at all.

“I brought something,” Nina said. She pulled out all the postcards he’d sent over the years, a large batch that bulged at the seams of a padded envelope. Airport terminals, layover cities, all those airplanes. The last year had revealed so much, including the way her father had actually stayed connected in a quiet (and still insufficient) way.

“I kept them.”

“I didn’t know if you would. You weren’t always into them like we were.”

“I wasn’t. I didn’t even remember that I saved them. Found this stash looking through a bunch of old boxes, now that I know what to look for. Dad, I never made the connection before now.”

Tom smiled sheepishly, stood, went to his bedroom, came back with a shoebox full of postcards from Delia, dozens of them, saved over their entire marriage. Travel postcards from trips they’d taken together. Funny ones he’d sent her from far away places, anniversary cards.

“I couldn’t throw them away,” he said. “But I couldn’t look at them either.”

Nina picked up one after the other to read the backs. Her mother’s handwriting, cheerful, full of small news from home.

“She loved you.”

“I loved her, too, and I love you.”

They sat with the postcards spread out between them, talking about travel and their family trips together. Tom unearthed the ones Nina herself sent home from the summer she spent in France. Both were careful to keep his collection from Delia separate from the ones Nina brought. They were both still sorting through the imperfect evidence of what had been.

“Next time,” Nina promised as she left. They hugged briefly, and she hopped in the car for the drive home on the freeway with the sunset to her right.

Monday, Nina found Mrs. Hanabusa in her usual spot, the late afternoon light turning everything gold.

“How was your visit?” Mrs. Hanabusa asked without looking up.

“Good. Hard. Both.”

“That’s how it goes.”

Nina found herself marveling, again. Mrs. H’s daily practices, the flower arranging, carefully selecting which sentiments to include and which to set aside. She seemed to belong more to the glow than the room, now.

“How did you learn to be at peace in the world?”

Mrs. Hanabusa smiled slightly. “Well, I needed it and then I experienced it once or twice. It felt good, and now I have practiced enough. Every day. Some days better than others.”

Peace wasn’t a state achieved once and held static forever. It was active, chosen, renewed daily through small deliberate gestures.

“You’re practicing, too, but you don’t call it that yet. It’s nicer when you know.”

Nina thought about the drive to Tempe, the decision to keep the postcards, the inclination to let her father try, and the fear he’ll fly away again. It was not easy, definitely practice. Also, yes… nice.

Nora’s cards came less frequently through the spring. Nina recognized the sacred cycle of becoming and belonging. Nora had less to say about longing, more about the daily goings-on. She was living in Taiwan.

Hiked Taroko Gorge with work friends. Mountains are unreal—marble cliffs, jade rivers. Think of you, often. –N

Nina pulled out a postcards of Saguaro at sunset awash with a super bloom of springtime flowers. She wrote her response, but didn’t rush it. Set it on her desk, next to the others ready to go out. There was time. Their lives would keep coming and going in a different rhythm now, and that was enough.

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Solo Travelers

Each travel alone, except the air they share. Nora is happy going solo, and Tom is somewhere in between.

The teahouse was tucked next to a dumpling shop on a narrow lane in Da’an District. Nora walked past it three times before noticing the English sign: Tea by Appointment Only.

Inside, a woman near seventy arranged porcelain cups on a low table. She glanced up, assessed Nora with a single look, and gestured to the cushion.

“First time?”

“First time for tea ceremony,” Nora said. “Not first time feeling lost.”

The woman smiled. Poured water over the leaves. The scent rose—something green and grassy, nothing like the black tea Nora’s grandmother used to brew.

“Lost is good,” the woman said. “A reason to pay attention.”

Nora’s colleague Mei-Ling had taken pity after watching Nora eat lunch alone for the third week running. “You need to get out,” Mei-Ling had said. “Explore. Be alone in a place that’s not your apartment.”

So here she was. Alone. Not lonely.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Nina. Nora silenced it without reading.

The tea was bitter, then sweet. She drank slowly.

“You travel alone?” the woman asked.

“Always.”

Nora had spent years cultivating solitude—long drives through Arizona backcountry, dawn hikes in Sabino Canyon, evenings on her balcony with no one talking. She chose the Taipei assignment partly for the chance to be anonymous and untethered.

The woman poured another cup. “Tourists look for what they expect to see. Solo travelers find who is actually there, including themselves.”

Nora thought about the next postcard to Nina. She wanted to tell her about the teahouse, the silence, the strange comfort of being somewhere no one knew her name.

It’s lovely to be solo in a strange land. Watching without explaining. Moving without negotiating. I sometimes forget who I am at home.

She finished her tea, bowed to the woman, stepped back into the crowded street feeling lighter than she had in months.

Tom stood on the deck of a fishing charter near Catalina, watching the captain clean yellowtail in the afternoon sun. He worked the knife along the spine with practiced efficiency, lifting the skin and scattering ribbons of bronze scales across the wet deck.

Tom was at sea three days, paid in full. His time between flights was long enough, he could have gone to Phoenix to check on the empty apartment. Or driven the two hours to Tucson to talk to Nina. Instead, he’d gone straight from the airport to the marina.

The ocean felt safer to Tom. He knew what he was dealing with—wind, current, the pull of the moon. On land, everything felt unmoored and awash in silence. The apartment with no one else there. Nina’s careful, measured heartache. The desperate life he’d abandoned in favor of flight schedules and hotel rooms.

The captain looked up. “You alright, man?”

“Fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You thinking about jumping?”

Tom laughed, the gallows humor helped. “Not far enough down.”

The captain went back to his work. Tom watched the horizon. His daughter was not far away. Working at the hospice. Taking care of people the way she’d taken care of her mother. While he was gone somewhere over the Pacific.

Tom didn’t make it to Jennie’s funeral. Delia was still sick and he had a flight schedule to keep. George hadn’t said much.

When Delia died two months later, George drove from Minnesota. Stayed ten days. Made coffee, answered the phone, helped with plans, and stood beside Tom at the service. Then, George drove back alone. Tom couldn’t make himself useful like that to anybody. Couldn’t even make himself stay.

A raven landed on the railing, tilted its head.

“Where’d you come from?” Tom asked.

The raven looked at Tom, croaked once, deep in its throat.

Suddenly the words came to him. He didn’t have a pen or a postcard handy, but finally he had something to say.

Flying solo is for the birds.

The raven lifted off, circled once, flew toward shore. Tom watched until it disappeared, then looked at his phone. He could get out of LA tonight, and rework his schedule from Phoenix next week. Enough time to get to Tucson and back, and to try.

The envelope arrived among the usual stack. Tom’s cramped handwriting unmistakable on the address. George carried it inside, set it on the kitchen table, made coffee before opening it.

Inside, a single sheet torn from a legal pad, Tom’s words filling margin to margin. George read it twice.

George—
Sorry it’s been so long. Don’t know how to say what needs to get out.

Been working more flights than I should. Phoenix to anywhere. Hotel rooms are easier. Nina barely talks to me. Can’t blame her.

You drove all the way to Delia’s funeral. Made everything possible. I should’ve done the same for you and Jennie. Told myself it was work. We both know better. You’ve always been better at this life.

I’m sorry. Thank you. Stay warm, and let’s talk soon.
—Tom

Tom was a restless kid — climbing trees, running off, coming home with scraped knees. George stayed close, watched birds, kept track of his brother.

After Jennie died, Tom just wasn’t around. George wanted to be angry but didn’t have the strength. Grief made him numb for awhile. Now, he was just glad to have his brother back, or at least a longer letter.

Mrs. Hanabusa sat by her window in the common room, as she often did. Hands folded in her lap. Face turned toward the light. Eyes resting gently on the flowering hibiscus outside.

Nina paused in the hallway, watching.

How did she keep such a calm reserve? After the camps, after losing everything, seeing your family degraded. How did she maintain that peace?

She would probably credit her mother, her grandmothers, and their extended friends and family. All gone, except her sister. How does she do it, still?

Mrs. Hanabusa turned her head slightly and smiled.

Nina smiled back, and walked on.

The story above is fiction, but the new Postcard People feature is real life! Meet Christine N. from Switzerland, who posts about her grandmother’s collection.

Card Crossings

A magic carpet takes us to a far away photo show, and a beach scene brings back old memories.

Nina found Mrs. Hanabusa in the common room sorting groceries into cloth bags. The postcard was still in Nina’s hand—a Navajo textile in geometric patterns, black and white against red wool.

“Let me help,” Nina said, taking two bags.

Mrs. Hanabusa glanced at the card. “From your friend? The one who went to Taipei?”

“She just arrived.” Nina turned the card over.

Made it. Everything moves faster here. First night was a photo exhibit on Mt Nunhu. Already miss the slow mornings. —N

Funny, Nina had received Nora’s text with images from the show that night, long before the postcard arrived in her mailbox here in Tucson.

They walked to Mrs. Hanabusa’s room. Nina set the bags on the small counter. Mrs. H studied the postcard, her finger tracing the pattern.

“My grandparents had one like this. Hung in their house on the flower farm.” She paused. “My grandmother found it at a trading post in the twenties. She said the geometry reminded her of Japanese family crests. Clean lines. She hung it in the room where they did arrangements.”

Mrs. H’s voice stayed quiet, remembering. “After the war, when we came back from the camps, the farm was gone. But a neighbor had saved some things. The rug was one of them. Grandmother cried when she saw it. I was small, maybe seven. I didn’t understand then what it meant to get something back.”

She opened a drawer, pulled out a small wooden box. Inside lay perhaps a dozen postcards, all showing Ikebana arrangements with low, horizontal compositions in shallow containers. Pink and red cosmos rising from a white porcelain vase. Allium gigantium’s perfect spheres balanced with small lantana blooms. A giant monstera leaf with a canna lily and a white chrysanthemum.

Mrs. Hanabusa handed Nina the stack of cards. She flipped through slowly, admiring each floral design.

“My sister sent these from Osaka. Our grandmother taught the traditional way. These are more like her arrangements, traditional but made new.”

Mrs. H pointed to the one with the iris. Nina looked closer. The composition was deliberate. Bold strokes against a spare background.

“Your friend will send you more postcards?”

“She promised,” Nina replied.

“Good,” Mrs. H smiled. “We get bored without friends.”

George had haunted thrift stores his whole life. Mostly he looked for tools—socket wrenches, levels, hand planes that still had their blades. Things he could use or restore.

Now he looked for postcards too.

The Goodwill in Red Wing had a basket of them near the register. Fifty cents each. He sorted through slowly. Tourist shots of the Badlands. A faded view of the State Capitol. Then he found a few good ones.

A real photo postcard showing Lake Pepin framed by trees, “Father of Waters” etched in careful script. The water stretched wide and calm, clouds massed above the bluffs.

A color card of Minneapolis Public Library, the old red brick building with its round tower and arched windows. George remembered when they torn it down in 1951.

A chrome card showing a white horse leaning over a fence, red barn and farmhouse in the background.

And then—George stopped. Sugar Loaf Mountain near Winona. A beach scene, families on the sand, kids on playground equipment, swimmers in the water. The mountain rising behind them.

He was transported to that very day. Their family had been right there, doing exactly that. The kids running between the beach and the playground. The particular blue of the water. How his wife had packed sandwiches that got sand in them and nobody cared.

George bought all four cards. Two dollars total. At home he examined them under the desk lamp before he got to thinking about each message.

He wrote to Emma:

Found this real photo from Lake Pepin. “Father of Waters” they called it. Your wanderlust comes honestly—this river goes all the way to the Gulf. Love, Grandpa

To Jack:

Get to the good old libraries while you can. This one is gone already! Love, Grandpa

To Lily:

See how the fence posts get smaller as they go back? That’s tricky to draw! Give it a try. Love, Grandpa

He paused at the fourth card, and let out a small sigh. Sugar Loaf Mountain, seems like another lifetime. Finally, he wrote:

This one is for you, kiddo. Reminds me of you and the guys and Mom. Fun times! Love, Dad

George added addresses and stamps. Put on his coat and walked to the mailbox, a short stretch of the legs that he now enjoyed. A chickadee called from the pine tree across the street—its clear two-note song cutting through the cold afternoon air.

wake up with wanderlust, too?

Though the story is fiction, vintage postcards are still a fun way to explore.
Browse the selection at our eBay store

Mailbox Moments

Nina makes a long distance deal with a dear friend, and George finds a new use for old memories.

Nina arrived early at the coffee shop near campus in Tempe. The drive up from Tucson was faster than she expected. Nora slid into the booth at 9am sharp. “You’re glowing,” Nina said.

“Nerves.” Nora grinned. “Two years in Taipei, three weeks to learn Mandarin.”

They ordered. Nina nudged a package across the table. She’d wrapped the book of postcards the night before, Navajo Textiles, each page a detachable card with a different striking design. Almost too good to take apart.

Nora opened it and smiled. “These are perfect. They will remind me where I came from. And, we can keep them! I’ll send them back to you.”

She flipped through the cards. “My grandmother did this. Sent us postcards from every trip. Maybe that’s why I love to travel.”

“I want to hear all about it,” Nina said. “Something to look forward to in the mailbox.”

“Deal.”

They talked until Nora had to leave for meetings. Nina hugged her friend outside, watched her disappear into the parking garage. On the drive back to Tucson, she thought about when she might travel again. Someday.

In Minnesota, George came across a box of old stationery while cleaning out a drawer in the office. He’d been ignoring this stuff too long, but it had to be done. He was surprised to find a bunch of notecards and envelopes, postcards from their own travels, even some stamps. Jennie must have tucked them away years ago, then forgotten.

He shuffled through the stack, smiled, and thought about their grandchildren.

Emma, sixteen, newly licensed, texting him sunset photos. Jack, thirteen, reading everything, and his own library growing. Lily, nine, from whom he routinely received animal drawings in manila envelopes.

He wrote to Emma first:

Found this sunset and thought of you – keep your eyes on the horizon! Love, Grandpa

Then, to Jack:

You can find a library in every place. Hope you go some day, and your collection grows. Love, Grandpa

Finally, to Lily, though his hand was aching:

For my favorite artist: a cat to inspire your next drawing. Keep sending pictures. Love, Grandpa

He addressed the cards and peeled the Forever stamps from their yellowed backing. The afternoon sun was glinting off the glassy surface of the snow as George walked down the drive and out to the mailbox. These should get there before Christmas, he thought. Next he’d knock the icicles off the eves over the porch steps, then make dinner.

thoughtful gifts under $15

Though the story above is fiction, a book of postcards is still a great gift.
Browse the selection at our eBay store

Kitsch as Kitsch Can

Sifting through the stacks this season, in search of levity and brevity.

Oh dear, a trove of kitschy postcard sets has appeared in The Posted Past studio. Careful opening boxes around here. I’ve been sorting and stocking the store this month, getting ready for the holidays.

Most of these vintage finds make thoughtful gifts for nature seekers, travelers, and art lovers. Some make for big belly laughs, too. Quit your job for two minutes and follow me.

Graphic novelist Paul Hornschemeier gives us thirty So-So Heroes, like Amalgamonster and Biggeespeare, in a nicely packaged postcard set. Bound to scare your friends, a little.

This next collection by fine artist and designer Rex Ray feels like a festive fondue party in a retro-future living room. Witty banter, wry smiles, and wood grain. Get your sweater sets.

I am Yours from Seattle-based artist Joe Park comes with a neatly-placed curatorial note from Robin Held and a lovely literary sketch by Jen Graves.

“You have seen these folks before–even if you don’t know where”

The collection does feel like finding a tiny gallery all to yourself, and a weird world of bears and bunnies. Worth the trip!

Stay Tuned by Nathan Fox is a visual romp through the artist’s fantastical funhouse. Eye-frying colors and psyche-stained scenes will make you feel like you woke up on the other side of a paranormal universe.

Anything pre-Y2K is officially vintage now. Not funny, I know. These Golden 50s throwback designs make it even worse. You’ll be thanking your lucky leg-warmers we made it out ok, mostly.

Check out the new holiday gift vibes

Fresh selections every day!

Ancestors Radio

Dial into this easy listening station from your heart.

In the quiet hours after he died, I heard Dad’s voice clear as a bell inside me. Left chest, near my heart, broadcasting from a heavenly radio station.

He’s not an advice line. More like a tinkling piano in an airport lounge where it’s always sunset or sunrise somewhere.

It’s not just him. My grandmothers have a talk show, conspiring on our behalf from the front porch of a woodsy cabin. Some of my aunts are traveling the span of the universe on magic carpets, and sending back reports.

Dear Bob, Thank you very much for the card. I am in nature and a play now. Please Write Me. xo xo Love Sally xo

Sally writes to Bob from stayaway camp in upstate New York

Ancestors Radio is on in the background all the time. I put on piano music in the house to dial in. Humming along and half-listening, I grasp what I can, especially as it relates to family stories and postcards. Little magic carpet rides, too.

We’re into a new season of wonder, now. Awe is on the air. Stay tuned!