Who do you tell when disaster strikes? Despite their cheery reputation, postcards delivered the bad news, too.
One of seven tornados cut a swath through Omaha at 5:30pm on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913. More than a hundred people perished with many more injured and the city’s infrastructure in ruin. A century later, scars of the event are still palpable in the story, architecture, and photographic memory of the city.
Devil Clouds is worth the watch. This hour-long documentary made around the 100th anniversary explores the event and its aftermath. I found it while researching the two stray postcards here. Digging through the Nebraska State Historical Society Archives, I got the tragic news more than a century late.
Disaster images fill in what words can’t describe. In the immediate response, their visual details and captions become coordinates for streets that no longer have familiar signs and recognizable landmarks. Soon, commercial postcards are for sale and news gets out to concerned family and friends. In Omaha, before-and-after pictures of restored homes and businesses appeared in less than a year. Even today, the moral story of the town is built on that rubble and their can-do recovery effort.
The vintage images help us contextualize world events then and now. Their lore of community resilience gives us clues about what to do when fortune fails us. We pool resources, stay connected, and get crafty. In Omaha, the ‘Hello Girls’ kept the few working telephone lines staffed right through the storm, then turned their building into a hospital in the days after.
Disaster postcards are a substantial niche in the much larger scene of collecting postcards that document historic events. As we discovered last year, the birth of a volcano in Mexico was global news in 1943. For a small village it was pure tragedy. For collectors, these images are rare finds.
June 1908 Kansas City – Santa Fe StreetJune Flood 1908 Kansas City
Though the timing is coincidental, comparing nature’s wrath with man-made disaster is also telling. Omaha was in a moment of rebirth as the fog of WWI descended on Europe. The Parícutin volcano plumes briefly stole the newsreel spotlight from wartime food-rationing in March 1943.
Why do we cause each other such suffering, knowing what life already has in store? The evidence is brutal, shouldn’t it also be obvious? It is best to prepare for tornado season, and avoid war.
Remember that you will die, but your vacation photos live on.
Looking back takes a measure of imagination. Even if it was you back then, time and distance change the story. The past isn’t exactly what we remember, especially when the memories aren’t even ours.
What happens when the evidence is all that is left?
Today’s time travel includes names, exact dates, even a Greyhound itinerary. In the collection, we’ll see images of two women with young children who may be grandparents now. If you’re familiar with California and its famous redwoods, this might look like a photo album of your own. Travel ephemera include maps, tickets and brochures, the lunch menu from Camp Curry, and a tiny recipe book from Fisherman’s Wharf.
This isn’t a family vacation, at least not ours. The genealogy is discoverable, but that’s not our aim. The arms-length context gives us another way to look back, a wander through the American West by bus in late summer 1955.
If you know these two, send me a note!
These photos were carefully fixed into a well-organized keepsake album documenting the fun-filled vacation, a roundtrip bus ride from Phoenix to San Francisco with a stayover at Camp Curry in Yosemite and a tour of Chinatown nightlife in the city.
Miss Betty, maybe.
Betty and Margaret with the kids.
Cute kids.
Love each other.
Stick together.
Even through this.
Even through this.
Also an adventure.
Yosemite!
Outdoor dining at Camp Curry.
Arriving home, but to the same place?
We’re not sure.
Here’s to old familiar furniture.
A meticulous hand-penciled numbering system helped me put the trip timeline together and the photo locations in order. Zooming in added more connections, including two images by Moulin, the famous photographer of San Francisco and its surrounds.
No doubt this collection came to us because of the postcards, which provides a lovely windows-down cruise up the West Coast with all the scenic stops.
Days of California Dreaming.
Signal Hill, Long Beach
Bixby Park, Long Beach
Redondo, Hermosa, and Manhattan beaches from Palos Verdes Estates view.
Union Station in Los Angeles
Los Angeles International Airport, circa 1955.
Los Angeles freeway interchange, circa 1955.
Merced, CA, looking west on Seventh Street.
Lake Yosemite, near Merced, California.
Arch Rock at Yosemite National Park
Yosemite national Park Entrance Gates and Ranger Station on Highway 140
Yosemite national Park, Half Dome and Sentinel Bridge over Merced River.
Yosemite National Park, panorama view from Wawona Tunnel.
El Capitan, Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite National Park, the Four Falls: Nevada, Yosemite, Vernal, and Bridal Veil.
Yosemite National Park, Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls.
Sequoia in the Mariposa Grove in the south entrance, Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite National Park, Big Trees Lodge.
Yosemite National Park, Wawona Tunnel Tree.
Nevada Fall with rainbow.
Yosemite National Park, Yosemite Lodge.
Yosemite National Park, the beautiful Ahwanee Hotel.
The Firefall that flares from light hitting Glacier Point.
Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936.
San Francisco City Hall, modeled after the US Capitol.
Mission Dolores in San Francisco, founded in 1776.
Panorama of San Francisco from Twin Peaks.
Golden Gate Park Conservatory, San Francisco
Portals of the Past, a relic from the great fire of 1906.
Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park
Steinhart Aquarium, circa 1955.
Fishing Fleet, photo by Gabriel Moulin,
Alcatraz Island, photo by Gabriel Moulin.
Union Square, San Francisco, circa 1955.
Mission Santa Barbara founded in 1786
Coit Memorial Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
Included is a night in Chinatown, as the itinerary promised. These rare, real photo postcards signed front and back may require more research.
For the summer of 1955 (and for many years after, I hope) these mementos stood in for all the laughter, mystery, and adventure that two gals can gather in a lifetime. Though the photos and memories are not our own, the little joys of summer still shine through. After all these years, the collection still reminds us to get on the bus and go.
Other people collect (or hoard) for their own reasons. I file for fun.
These handmade ceramic tiles were dropped off some time ago by an art teacher who was clearing out his studio for retirement. Exciting work ahead for him, and he’d had enough of these. He acquired them from an elderly artist, or perhaps her estate sale. She made them, sold them, and had kept this lot for quite some time herself, he said. Murky milestones, but perhaps that dates the tiles to the 1950s or 1960s in the Mid-Atlantic region.
The design is definitely mid-century, with a stylized sans-serif font that gains texture and luminosity when fired into a durable glazed ceramic tile. All caps, hand-stamped alphabet and numerals, each one a different take on patterns and colors like burlap or verdigris. I suspect some are test tiles and off-casts, and nicer now somehow.
Turns out, I do have a few Fs left
All told, the collection includes about twelve different sets. The most complete series is a light terracotta color, four inches high, with white letters and lovely ochre and rust hatch marks. Maddeningly, it has no Es.
No set is complete. Many letters and numbers have duplicates. I have a tub of tiny fives. Did I get lucky, or what?
F on the left, not an ELucky double-nickels
Long ago, at my first proper internship, I left a neatly-labeled file drawer as my lasting contribution to a small staff that was kind enough to lend me a chair one seething summer in Phoenix. All the tri-fold pamphlets from Arizona’s cultural outposts organized alphabetically. Grant-funded evidence for them, and a solid list of road trips for a budding wanderer like me. I was in it for the index.
Tile files
I’m not sure this collection will take me on a mad search for their maker. The details I have are plausible, if not plentiful, and I’m more interested in where the tiles will go from here. They have been for sale in a friend’s real-life boutique. Released, out wild again in the Chesapeake.
The remainder set is now back with me, photographed, boxed, and labeled for easy retrieval. Soon, I’ll have an image database to search and sort, and my own online shop. A summer project that will serve the postcard collections, too.
But first, some fun. The smaller sizes feel like runes, very satisfying to hold and shuffle. Yes, I spelled out several unmentionable words and phrases. The numbers 4 and 8 are my favorite designs, and who can resist Q words? Help me, indeed!
For those who want to start diagramming right now, here are the first two sets. Send me a note if you need a specific combination immediately. I know just where to find them.
I’m a fan of research that never reveals its source or finds the answer. There are still archives to explore, and a feeling that the story itself refuses to resolve.
A year ago, I wrote about the mysterious photographer Navarro who meticulously documented the birth of a volcano. This week, I found three additional Navarro images in an album full of Mexican real photo postcards. One image is directly related to Parícutin; a haunting black and white photo of the inside of the church before it burned.
The other two images will take more time to discover their origins. Now, I’m motivated to go digging for the one file folder in the Smithsonian archives that may finally tell us about this enigmatic soul.
Until then, enjoy the tragic beauty and extraordinary drama of these moments from long ago, and stay with me one more day in the mystery of it all.
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.
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.
Dignitaries and honor guard at an Antwerp train station, 1920 Summer Olympics.
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.
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.
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.
A fool in full red tunic, tights, and pointed cap riding a half-finished horse. In 1905, Picasso was 23 and in the middle of his Rose Period, when circus performers, acrobats, and jesters were recurring dreams. He saw what the Fool knows, and the rest of us learn along the way.
No one can quite pin down the origin of April Fool’s Day. One theory traces it to the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, and New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1. Those who merrily celebrated the old date were mocked for their foolishness. Other evidence points to the Roman festival of Hilaria at the end of March, when people dressed in disguises and merriment was mandatory. A third argument simply blames the weather. Spring being notoriously unreliable, the fool is the farmer who trusts an early warm day.
Every court kept a fool, the one person licensed to speak the subtext. Under cover of bells and absurdity, they told the king what the courtiers would never. They didn’t matter and slipped away deftly, so they got away with it.
Shakespeare’s fools still deliver their wisdom from the stage. Touchstone sees everyone clearly in As You Like It. Feste in Twelfth Night diagnoses each character’s self-deception with a song. The Fool’s detachment is not ignorance; their folly is not fantasy. It is practical sense and functional freedom. The fool is often the one who tells the full tale as we go.
Let’s not forget all the fun in foolishness. Duckboy Cards gave us these guffaws from Hamilton Montana in the late 20th century.
In the Tarot, the Fool is the zero card, about to step off a cliff with a small satchel. The Fool’s journey is curious, flexible, and nonlinear, akin to the Buddhist beginner’s mind with the great powers of not-knowing.
The disciple Paul wrote that followers were fools for Christ, who knew that worldly measures were the real absurdities. Yurodivye, the holy fool in Russian Orthodox culture, courted ridicule and apparent madness as a form of spiritual freedom.
The Feast of Fools, celebrated across Europe in medieval centuries, inverted the church hierarchy for a day. Junior clergy elected a mock bishop and sacred ritual was gently parodied. The highest were made low for a day. The Church tolerated it for centuries, perhaps because it understood the release it provided.
In each of these traditions, foolishness is not failure. The Fool observes with a keen eye, collects information and assets, plays his cards carefully, and keeps his palm open.
Just such a jester has been riding alongside us this season. In Lucky Us, we find that only a fool pursues luck outright. In Spring Cleaning, earth itself foolishly hopes despite all evidence of winter. In Healing Ward, nurses stringing crepe paper garlands for a room full of wounded men, and show us the beautiful absurdity of insisting on Christmas.
My thanks to you fellow fools who keep reading. Only you know why!
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.
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
Our new space for the old stuff that no one ever threw away – yay!
A picture is worth a thousand words, which can be tough news for a writer. I like words and images together, and art cards are a peaceful place to be while sorting through the longer storylines happening around here.
To start an art card, I pull together a collection of cards and ephemera related to a theme or style I want to explore. Gather tools, supplies, and a drink at my art board. Set my phone aside, and pick up an exacto knife. Then, I sit down, quiet down, and begin to make meaning out of the materials in front of me. I’m nowhere near my computer or journal, but making an art card now and then is part and parcel with my writing process.
The Posted Past Art Card Gallery is inspired by so many wonderful postcard projects over the years. Worth mentioning are PostSecret, which invites anyone to share an anonymous secret on a postcard, and PostCrossing, which makes it easy to send and receive postcards around the world.
For our part, we collaborate with collage artists to make something small and special for everyone to enjoy. The artist requests a theme or two based on interests like, trees, farms, or portraits. We send an art card bundle and they create collage postcards with these materials. The postcard collages come back through the mail, celebrating the wear and tear of the postal service journey.
The Art Card Gallery is a place to see art card collages created by artists around the world.
If you’re already a subscriber, bless you for hanging on as you do. You get a little note in your inbox each Wednesday. Most times it flits away like a red cardinal, down into the cold, thatched hinterland of your inbox scroll. I know.
Introducing the Wednesday Weekly Reader, a new place to catch up with a previous story series bundled in a way that is easier to read. If you love our national parks, wonder about where the past gets lost, or know a few lonely snowbirds, a story series may meet your fancy.
