Postcards are about everything. Here are helpful places to start.
Advertising: Promotional cards and ephemera issued by businesses featuring products, hotels, roadside diners, and vintage corporate branding.
Animals: Illustrations and photographs of wildlife, domestic pets, livestock, and exotic animals in early zoos.
Architecture: Detailed views of famous skyscrapers, historic homes, bridges, monuments, and eye-popping building interiors.
Art & Artists: High-quality reproductions of fine art, avant-garde illustrations, and works signed by celebrated artists.
Aviation: Depictions of early commercial airliners, military aircraft, and aviation history.
Disasters: Real photo postcards capturing the immediate aftermath of historic fires, floods, earthquakes, and train wrecks.
Expositions & Fairs: Souvenir cards documenting the massive pavilions, midways, and crowds of World’s Fairs and international exhibitions.
Fantasy & Surrealism: Early 20th-century artistic cards featuring bizarre dreamscapes, anthropomorphic animals, and optical illusions.
Greetings: Featuring birthdays, anniversaries, and memorial notices. Also, cards featuring personal correspondence among friends and family. Mothers and Fathers Day cards found here.
Holidays: Festive greetings for Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day, often featuring embossed or mechanical elements.
Humor & Satire: Comic illustrations, witty social commentary, political caricatures, and seaside resort double-entendres.
Maritime: Images of ocean liners, naval warships, lighthouses, busy harbor docks, and deep-sea fishing vessels.
Military & War: Wartime propaganda, soldier portraits, trench life conditions, military encampments, and patriotic home-front greetings.
Native Americans: Photographs and idealized portraits documenting indigenous clothing, dwellings, tribal leaders, and daily customs.
Novelty: Specialized cards incorporating non-paper materials like leather, wood, metal, real feathers, or seeds.
Organizations: Cards representing specific colleges, fraternities, labor unions, and fraternal orders like the Elks or Masons.
Politics: Campaign materials, presidential portraits, suffragette movements, and satirical commentary on historic elections.
Portraits: Official portraits and candid snapshots of people: celebrities, politicians, royals, and the rest of us.
Railroads: Crisp views of steam locomotives, luxury train interiors, urban depots, and remote rural train stations.
Real Photo (RPPCs): Actual photographic prints on postcard paper capturing candid, unedited snapshots of daily social history.
Religion: Depictions of historic cathedrals, country churches, biblical scenes, and cross-denominational spiritual greetings.
Scenic Locales: Familiar photos and illustrations of natural wonders, national parks, mountain ranges, and pristine coastlines.
Social History: Candid documentation of factory labor, farm conditions, early trades, parades, cultural events, and social pomp.
Sports: Action shots and team portraits covering sports activities, including Olympic competitions.
Towns & Main Streets: Documented views of historic streetscapes, mom-and-pop storefronts, old motels, and early gas stations.
Travel & Outings: Holiday trips, travel remembrances, family reunions.
Universities: Team memorabilia, stadiums, featured faculty, booster bounties.