Vintage Postcards – The Posted Past

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.

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.

To Read More

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

The Fool Knows

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!

To Read More

Shakespeare’s Fools — All the fools’ best lines from the Folger Library

Picasso’s Rose Period — From 1904–1906, Picasso absorbed French culture in warm pink and orange light

The Feast of Fools — A matter of great Catholic controversy still

The Tarot Fool — The British Museum’s collection of vintage Tarot cards

April Fool’s Day — Museum of Hoaxes theorizes the origins of the holiday

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

Our new space for the old stuff that no one ever threw away – yay!

Moments We Miss

Valentine’s Day is over. The chocolates parceled out, consumed in a binge, or sweetly regifted. The cards are in a stack. Love trudges on.

Before we go, there is a word worth saying about silences and the quiet costs of delayed connections, and those missed entirely.

In May 2023, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that stopped me mid-scroll. Loneliness had reached epidemic levels in the United States. He was not describing the usual suspects—a widower, a loner, someone at the edge of class or condition. I had to admit, his warning rang a bell in my own heart. I was among a growing contingent of the ordinary, ambient, alarmingly average lonely. As a caregiver, days passed without anyone really seeing me, or me really wanting to be noticed.

The Surgeon General called it a public health crisis. He compared its effects on mortality to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Actual harm done.

Indeed, social isolation raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and early death. The health research is not soft or sentimental. The body registers being unseen the same way it registers physical pain — same neural pathways, same hormonal alarm signals, same disrupted sleep, same compounding risks. We are living inside a paradox: more connected by technology than any humans in history, and perhaps lonelier than our ancestors.

In the golden age of the postcard — roughly 1900 to 1920 — Americans sent billions of them. A trip to the lake. A hello from the city. A heart, a name, a single line of longing, on full view to the mail carrier and anyone else who handled it along the way. The medium demanded brevity, levity, and a light touch.

That simple approach is worth noticing, because we tend to use the absence of time as our primary excuse for not reaching out. We sense there isn’t room in the average difficult day for a real conversation. So we wait. And the time doesn’t come. And the silence grows.

A postcard is a signal, not a report. It says: I haven’t forgotten. A brief message can make a big point. At times, the whispered delivery bears the full meaning.

The research on what makes people feel less alone points not to the depth of connection in any given moment, but to its consistency. There is comfort in the reliable sense that someone, somewhere, is holding you in mind. A brief, warm gesture, repeated, does more for that feeling than an overwrought or inconsistent one.

Simple gestures are not consolation prizes. They are the architecture of belonging.

Sadly true, is often easier to extend kindness to a stranger than to sustain the loving glow among the people you know best. A stranger on a difficult day can receive warmth without a complicated history. They don’t owe you a response and you likely won’t know how the gift was felt. You haven’t let them down in the small accumulated ways that life’s closeness allows.

The people we love most are the ones we are most likely to let drift or actively ignore. A peculiar paralysis comes with the familiar foibles, caring deeply, and feeling the gap widen.

So here is a gentle nudge, the week after the holiday, when the pressure is off and the expectations are low. Not because it’s February. Because it’s Wednesday, and someone who loves you needs to know. A postcard or a hug, a humble tug on the sleeve or a quiet walk. None of it asks or offers too much. A simple, “We are ok,” can be enough.

LOVE IS CRINGE

The seasonal gallery is creepy, cringey, lacking humor, and awfully lowbrow. If love has struck you awkward or dumb, we know how.

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.

Though our holiday story series stops here, we hope you stay in touch!
Subscribe to get a message about a postcard every Wednesday.
Also, love is in the air! Next month rare embroideries.

Limited edition Cardinal on a Cactus postcards available at Tempe Yarn & Fabric and online.

Winter Counts

Like the flash of a red cardinal in the winter snow, both George and Nina suddenly see something that has been there all along.

George woke early in the day on New Year’s Eve. Light snow outside and the question he’d been turning over since Christmas: when to take Emma birding. He called before he could overthink it.

“Tomorrow morning?” Mai answered. “She’ll be ready at dawn.”

They met at Frontenac State Park at first light. Emma hopped out of Mai’s car already dressed for the cold—layers, boots, a hat George recognized as one of her mother’s favorites. Mai waved from the driver’s seat, smiled, pulled away.

“Just us?” George asked.

Emma’s eyes rolled slightly and smirked as she held up his binoculars. She’d already adjusted the strap. The green Audubon field guide was tucked under one arm, a new notebook in her other hand.

“Mom has to get ready for the party. Plus, she said it’s too cold.”

“Fair enough,” George smiled back and nodded toward the trailhead. “Binos up, move slowly, scan and listen. You go first.”

They walked the trail along the frozen river in tandem, as quietly and patiently as he had advised. Not looking for birds exactly, but for movement, for shapes that didn’t fit the pattern of branches and sky. Emma spotted the first cardinal.

“There,” she whispered.

George raised his older binoculars. He had kept them for Jennie on the rare occasion she wanted to come along.

“Tan body, red-orange bill, and a sort-of red crest,” Emma slowly described the bird.

“Good eye. Watch how she moves.”

The bird hopped branch to ground, ground to branch.

“How did you know it was female?” Emma asked.

“Colors and the song notes. Males are showier and louder. Females sing too. They’re just quieter about it.”

Emma opened her notebook.

Female cardinal. Frontenac State Park. New Year’s Day. Feeding on lower branches of sumac. Light song noted.

They found chickadees, a downy woodpecker, juncos, and stopped along the way to record and discuss each bird. Emma’s notes filled two pages. George watched her move through the stark and cold forest—confident, curious, at ease. Mai had been more careful at this age, tentative on the trails. Emma walked as though she belonged here. She did.

Driving her home, George said, “You’re a natural. Your mom was good, too. She could walk so slowly, make no noise at all.”

Emma smiled. “She says I get it from you.”

“Well, I got this for us,” George said as he pulled into the driveway.

He flashed his phone screen to reveal the app he had downloaded, the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds but online and searchable. Right on the front, the very first photo was a male and female pair of Northern Cardinals.

Emma’s eyes lit up. Quietly, she imagined how many they’d find all over Minnesota in the days and weeks and (hopefully) years ahead.

Back home, George leaned out of the window to pick up the mail before driving down the ice-packed drive. He tossed the stack on the seat. On top, a photo of an American Airlines plane. He knew who it was before he turned it over.

Flight delay. Thinking about you and Jennie. Can’t believe they’re both gone. —T

His younger brother, Tom, both of them widowers now. Their wives were gone within months of each other. At times, they both worried they would lose each other, too. Too much pain, way too much.

George had been waiting for Tom to call. He knew that constant work and distance was his way of coping, but how long was too long?

George looked at Tom’s card again, familiar but this time a sudden realization hit him. Tom sends postcards. He’d received at least a half a dozen over the years–all photos of old jets. George had never written back. Not once. He’d been waiting for the phone to ring. Now he remembered the little collection of airplanes in his desk drawer.

He sat down. Pulled a card from his own growing stack, a color photo of a trail like today’s but after the thaw. His message was short, with room for more later.

Got your card. Miss them every day. Miss talking to you. —George

He addressed it to Tom’s apartment in Phoenix, the one he’d moved to after Delia died, and rarely slept in. Stamped it. Put on his coat and walked back out to the mailbox, certain of what he’d been missing.

Nina found Mrs. Hanabusa arranging flowers in the common room—a small practical arrangement, simple stems in a shallow dish.

“For the holiday?” Nina asked.

“My own amusement.” Mrs. Hanabusa adjusted a branch. “Ikebana, flowers carry meaning. Not just pretty, it’s a message.”

“What does this one say?” Nina asked.

Mrs H pointed to the chrysanthemum. “This one means longevity, joy. Used in autumn arrangements and also at funerals. Pomegranate. Internal life, good luck, and natural cycles of life and death.”

Nina watched her work. The precise angles, the negative space.

Mrs. Hanabusa stood up and moved back to considered her creation. “New year. Endurance through winter. Joy waiting to flower. Life coming and going all the time.”

She looked at Nina. “What’s your story?”

Nina placed her postcard on the table and sat down. A cluster of saguaro against a bright blue sky, blank on the other side.

“I don’t know what to say to him,” Nina whispered.

“Ikebana, we don’t fill all the space. We leave room. Leave room,” said Mrs. Hanabusa with some emphasis this time.

Nina thought for a moment, and wrote:

Got your note. Like the saguaro, I’m still here. Hug? —N

Not forgiveness. Not resolution. Presence and a little humor, with some room. She added her father’s address in Phoenix. Stamped it and set it by her keys, knowing that it still might take days to put it in the mail.

The next morning, a third card from Nora arrived—black and white geometric patterns, stark and beautiful. An Inuit quilt made of duck knecks.

Mrs. Hanabusa was at the window again when Nina came in. Nina showed her the card. Mrs. H studied the design, then turned it over to read the back.

Found a noodle shop I love. Made friends at work. Some days are hard, some surprise me by how easily I could stay longer. —N

Mrs. Hanabusa looked up. “She signs just ‘N.’ Like you do.”

Nina blinked. She’d never noticed.

“My sister and I had our own shorthand, too. Still do.” Mrs. Hanabusa handed the card back carefully. “Secret code.”

Nina looked at the card again. The simple N. The years of friendship.

On her way home, she stopped at the blue mailbox on the corner. Pulled out the cactus card she’d written to her father to look at how she’d signed it. Just N.

She dropped it in the slot, heard it fall, and said a humble prayer. What else had she not noticed along the way?

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.