Friday, February 5. 2016
This collection of postcards, which dates back to the early 1900s, provides a beautiful snapshot into a time in Japanese history when trolley cars and modern buildings were slowly beginning to appear on the landscape. The hand-coloured photographs also serve as an important document of the Tokyo and Yokohama regions in the years preceding the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated the area and several surrounding prefectures.
Complete Story
Saturday, January 9. 2016
The New York Public Library has released a staggering collection of roughly 200,000 public domain materials via it's online portal. "Go forth, and reuse!" says Shana Kimball, manager of the library's public programs. Consisting of photographs, maps, postcards, manuscripts, they are a virtual treasure trove for archivists, researchers, writers or just plain 'ol armchair nostalgia buffs. Included in the massive collection is everything from manuscripts from Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to correspondence of founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson
Complete Story
Wednesday, December 2. 2015
Mossgreen's postcard auction, to be held in Melbourne on December 14, is claimed as the first of its kind held by any major auction house in Australia. The sale has been organised by Gary Watson, of Prestige Philately, now part of Mossgreen's rapidly expanding empire. Watson, himself a postcard collector, says he has always considered this segment a "grossly undervalued market".
"Your average postcard collectors are mainly in it because they are cheap to buy," he says. He finds it amazing that superb images that are often over 100 years old are still being traded for such little money.
Complete Story
Tuesday, November 24. 2015
You were, the advertising legend suggested, never alone with a Strand. Film stars like Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn were rarely seen without a cigarette dangling from their lips. It was all part of the image and it sold the product – but how many of those old brand names can you recall? Do you remember Black Cats, Ardath, Capstan, Craven A, Gold Flake and Du Maurier? What about Robin, Player's Weights and Woodbines?
Complete Story
Thursday, October 8. 2015
First designed for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, the postcards, designed by artist Jean-Marc Côté and others, are full of zany illustrations of how the French thought the year 2000 would look.
Complete Story
Thursday, September 24. 2015
In pre-television and early radio times, mass sharing of information and culture was printed. No selfies, no send button, no insta-anything. Postcards shared pieces of the world, and of people.
Bob Stoldal sees them as a rich source of information to cull from, literally a paper trail documenting the growth of Las Vegas as well as the auto-era travel industry. His collection is thousands of postcards strong, chronicling more than a century. And his interest isn’t so much the over-saturated images of mid-mod pylons, stylish fonts and Googie architecture, but rather the early 20th-century documentation of life on the ground here—the years between 1905 and 1931.
More Info
Wednesday, September 16. 2015
Bad ideas develop their own projectile inertia. Once energized, goofiness can sail untouched past the moment when the idea can be unmasked as ill-considered and intemperate.
Here's a goofy idea that seems self-propelled at the moment. Let's give Lake County Discovery Museum's 3.5 million-item Curt Teich Postcard Archives to the University of Illinois for free. That will save the county thousands of dollars in museum space and management costs. And besides, the university knows how to take care of such rare assets better than we common folks do.
Forest Preserves district officials pitched launching negotiations on such an idea to the Lake County Board recently. No one arose to suggest it might be a mistake based on misplaced values, like Paris giving the Eiffel Tower to Hoboken to save money. In fact, there seemed to be mostly sad, resigned, nodding-in-agreement-it's-inevitable heads.
Absent another volunteer, I will raise my hand.
It's a stratospherically dumb idea. Don't do it. You'll be sorry.
Complete Story
Tuesday, September 1. 2015
The Lake County Forest Preserve District could transfer ownership of the world-renowned Curt Teich Postcard Archives to the University of Illinois as part of a potential plan to save money and make the collection more accessible.
Established in 1982 at the district-run Lake County Discovery Museum at the Lakewood Forest Preserve near Wauconda, the archives have grown from the initial donation from the Chicago-based Curt Teich Co. to nearly 3 million items. It is regarded as the largest public collection of postcards and related materials in the world, and a premier source of images from the 20th century.
Complete Story
|