Antique Postcards
By Nadja Maril
Photos by Kimi Raspa
Collection of antique 19th century postcard relating to Provincetown, Massachusetts, mounted and framed under glass. |
Postcards are a souvenir item that we save as much as we share. They are compact, generally 3½" x 5", flat, and easy to store. A stack of postcards can easily tell the story of our travels while sparing us the bother of bringing along a camera. Fun to send to family and friends, antique cards are enthusiastically collected as a way to document the past. They look great mounted, framed under protective glass.
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the heyday of postcard production, the cards were avidly collected and displayed in fancy postcard albums. Today’s collectors prefer storing their cards in special plastic sleeves and placing them inside acid-free postcard boxes. Values can range from $1 to several hundred dollars, depending on condition, rarity, and subject matter.
The first postcards were created in Austria in 1869. One year later the first commercial picture postcard was produced in France.
The U.S. government first started publishing postal cards in 1873. The U.S. government postcards sold for a penny, whereas privately produced postcards required a 2-cent stamp. The way to get around the inequity was for advertisers to purchase the government’s penny postcards and then print advertising messages on them. These were, in effect, the first American picture postcards.
In 1898 the postage required for a privately produced postcard was reduced to 1 cent, and the picture postcard market expanded. Most high-quality cards were printed in Austria and Germany, where the cost of printing was lower than it was elsewhere. The majority of picture postcards were reproduced photomechanically on a printing press.
Some picture postcards were actual photographic prints of real photos, called telephotos. Costly to produce, they were manufactured in small quantities and are more rare and valuable.
Such artists as Harrison Fisher, Charles Dana Gibson, and Howard Chandler Christy, whose cards are avidly collected today, illustrated beautiful cards.
Before 1907, one side of the card was reserved for the postage stamp and the recipient’s name and address, requiring the illustration and message to be crowded on the other side. This is an easy way to date some antique postcards you may have.
There were postcards for Easter, birthdays, and Christmas, postcards for friendship and love, and advertising postcards, as well as the scenic picture postcard with which we are most familiar.
Other types of cards included humorous, surrealistic, novelty postcards made of unusual materials, and mechanical cards with moving parts.
Since Annapolis is a tourist area, being the capital of Maryland and home of the U.S. Naval Academy, a multitude of local postcards have been made through the years. Good hunting grounds for postcard collectors include gift shops and pharmacies with old inventory, collectible paper shows, antique shops and shows, and flea markets.
For more reading on the subject consult Collector’s Guide to Post Cards by Jane Wood or Collecting Picture Postcards by Geoffrey A. Godden.
Box
Tips on Organizing an Antique Postcard Collection
Postcards only 20 years old can be desirable if they are unused, are of a collectible subject, and are no longer being produced.
The same popular picture scene could have been printed twenty-six times, in which case the serious collector most highly values the first printing.
Differences in the same scene can include shifts from a bordered to a borderless picture, changes in color, and different captions.
Popular collector’s categories include transportation, such as postcards with ships, trains, railway stations, and airplanes; disasters (earthquakes, floods, fires); holidays; artists; and specific geographic locations.
Cards command higher prices near the sights they depict. For example, a card picturing the Annapolis City Dock 50 years ago is more valuable in Annapolis than in San Francisco.
Editor Nadja Maril is a nationally known author and authority on antiques. Questions or comments for her column can be e-mailed to editor@whatsupmag.com or mailed to What’s Up? Annapolis magazine at 929 West Street, Suite 208A, MD 21401 with a SASE. Sorry, but Ms. Maril can only give detailed responses to items she has space for in her column.
|
