Dede Horan‘s avocation as a postcard collector started when she was about 10 years old, and heard something drop between the fireplace mantel and her bedroom wall.
She reached behind the mantel and felt a sturdy, worn piece of paper that made a noise as she fished it out.
“It was a Squeaker,” said Horan, a tidy woman who wears her silver hair in a pageboy. She gives her age as “collecting postcards for over 50 years.”
A Squeaker, she explained, is a vintage postcard that has a hidden pouch for a noise-maker that squeaks when it’s compressed. As a 10-year-old, she was enchanted by the sound and by the vivid green eyes of the cat on the postcard.
“It was the first vintage card I had, and I still have it,” she said.
Before Twitter, before Instagram, before SnapChat, there were postcards.
Not quite a 140-character limit, but the available writing space was so limited that few senders wrote more than a couple of sentences. Sure, it’s still possible to make a postcard out of a photograph, but back then, most people just bought an image from a rotary rack to send or keep as a souvenir.
And unlike Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat, quite a few of those postcards were never mailed out.
Horan is also the daughter of a collector. Her mother began collecting postcards when the U.S. Navy stationed her in Florida during the 1940s. Horan estimates the size of her own collection at approximately 70,000 cards, including the Squeaker.
That sounds like a lot of postcards, except to fellow members of the Denver Postcard Club, whose collections also range into the high five and six figures. Members like to say, only half joking, that they are lucky their obsession doesn’t require much space. Quite a lot of postcards fit into a shoebox, which is perfectly designed to hold them.
Go to the Denver Postcard Club & Paper Show today from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, and see for yourself: Most of the postcards will be neatly displayed in shoebox-size cardboard files. The dealers separate postcards into categories — states, holidays, countries, bridges, railroad depots and animals, for example.
There are linen postcards. There are hand-colored postcards tinted with lead-based hues that sickened the artists who painted them. There are leather postcards, like the brown cowhide ones that Sergio Lugo likes to collect.
“They’re a novelty,” says Lugo, who is president of the Denver Philatelic Library and active in the Denver Postcard Club.
Lugo, a muscular, voluble man with interests as broad as his East Coast accent, knows by heart not only the years that cowhide postcards were available in the U.S. (1899 to 1907) but why Congress passed a law forbidding them (“The tannic acid in the leather made the stamps fall off!”).
Lugo also collects what collectors call “oilettes,” postcards that look like miniature oil paintings. His particular interest — postcard collectors tend to favor genres — is the YMCA postcards sold in Great Britain during World War I.
The cards, manufactured by the company Tuck (postcard collectors track specific manufacturers and certain postcard artists the way book collectors amass first editions of their favorite authors’ books) all feature the YMCA logo. Why?
“To appeal to the doughboys!” Lugo exclaimed. “Tuck knew they could sell the soldiers pictures of anything — English countryside, English paintings — if it had a YMCA logo on it. There’s a picture of Stratford-upon-Avon with a YMCA logo on it. The YMCA didn’t have anything to do with Shakespeare or Stratford-upon-Avon, but Tuck knew they could sell it to the doughboys if it had a Y logo.”
Something about that calculated capitalism appeals to Lugo’s sense of humor and to his appreciation for history. Those YMCA oilettes and the leather postcards might leave another collector cold.
But show a Barkalow postcard, especially one with a red bird outlined on the back, to Denver Postcard Club vice president Jeff Tyler, and if it’s not already in his collection, he will stop whatever he’s doing to inspect it. His collection also includes the Barkalow Bros‘ Moffat Line series that was sold, among other places, at a shop in Union Station and another Barkalow store in downtown Denver.
“Lots of people collect postcards based on the artist or the publisher,” Tyler said.
But just as often, people happen onto a specialty. Jane E. Finley, author of “Quilts in Everyday Life, 1855-1955,” began collecting photographs that included quilts and hand-pieced textiles, which led to her interest in postcards that featured quilts.
Postcard dealer Carl Weber, who attends Denver Postcard Club meetings as well as 30 postcard shows a year, knows people who collect disaster postcards. Weber has a sizable inventory of postcards that show the aftermath of earthquakes, tornadoes and other phenomena. Some postcards command astonishing prices, especially antique Halloween postcards that sell for $20 to $50 apiece and can be worth up to $1,000.
“I’ve always liked the old postcards — the messages on the back, the images,” Horan says.
“Sometimes, I’ll be going through a box of unsorted cards, and something will catch my eye, and that’s how I get started on a new collection.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
Denver Postcard & Paper Show
Browse antique postcards and papers from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Denver Postcard & Paper Show at Jefferson County Fairgrounds, 15200 W. Sixth Ave., Golden.
