Vintage Postcards: Postcard Blog » antique postcard

Determining Locations of Real-Photo Postcards: Wadesville, VA

VintagePostcards — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:37:40 +0000

Sometimes, when location information isn’t inscribed into the negative of a real-photo postcard, the location can still be determined — or at least narrowed down — with information found on the back of the postcard. In this instance, there’s a penciled notation reading “Wadesville, Virginia” on the back of the unused c. 1904-1918 Azo Tri 1 real-photo postcard showing Opequon Creek bridge construction.

However, there’s also an Opequon Creek bridge in nearby Berkeley County, West Virginia. Based on our online research, we believe this postcard shows the Opequon bridge in Clarke County, Virginia. If you think this is actually the West Virginia bridge over Opequon Creek, let us know. While research into “mystery postcards” is fun, sometimes, only local collectors have the knowledge base required to recognize a local landmark which has inevitably changed over time. Postmarks are also helpful, especially if a postcard contains text referencing specific locations.

Read more about documenting postcards with Internet research, or see many more real-photo postcards at our website. We also offer the world’s largest selection of postcard books.

A Fanciful Halloween Postcard

VintagePostcards — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:02:04 +0000

Halloween is our favorite holiday — everyone gets to be a child again. Halloween postcards are among the most popular of all collectible postcards, in part because of their fanciful nature. This c. 1907-1915 example has splendid graphics, depicting a young boy holding a jack o’lantern, as its smoke produces a witch on a broom with long, flowing brown hair. An owl sits to the right. Profusely gilded and embossed and with deep, rich colors, this is a fine example of a Halloween fantasy postcard. Happy Halloween!

Read more about Halloween postcards, or see more Halloween postcards at our website. We also offer the world’s largest selection of postcard books.

French Pug Dog Postcard

VintagePostcards — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:12:23 +0000

In honor of the 132nd Westminster Dog Show, which winds up tonight at Madison Square Gardens in New York City, here’s a vintage postcard of a French pug. He looks a little worried, for some reason. The antique postcard was artist signed by Kenyon in 1907.

See our dog postcards, or learn more about artist-signed postcards in our postcard bookstore.

Four interesting new dog breeds which were recently recognized by the American Kennel Club (AKC) are competing in the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog show. See pictures of the dog breeds and learn more about them.

Read another entry about artist-signed postcards.

Winter Sports – Antique Ice Skating Postcards

VintagePostcards — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:13:16 +0000

It’s cold outside but, overall, this has been a mild winter so far. Global warming? Who knows. Friends in Idaho and Canada report harsher-than-normal winters. Here are some winter sports postcards to view, if you’re indoors trying to keep warm.

This charming unused and undivided-back 1901-1907 postcard shows a boy wrapped up against wintry weather and ready to skate. Artist signed by American postcard artist C. W. Simpson, it’s from his “American Child Studies.” series. The boy’s red hat and scarf provide a nice counterpoint to the wintry tones of the ice and nearby birch trees. Simpson specialized in football, skiing and other sports postcards. We’ve also seen one from his “American Child” series showing a hockey game in progress. Learn more about Simpson in Mashburn’s The Artist-Signed Postcard Price Guide, available through our postcard bookstore.

This graphically striking 1922 postcard, artist-signed by Fidus (Hugo Hoppener) of Germany, depicts a female ice skater in a short tunic and with a fur muff in one hand! It conveys a great sense of action, and was published by Rommler & Jonas of Munich. See the ice skating postcard collectibles at our website.

Learn more about winter sports postcards.

Remembering a Lost Holiday

VintagePostcards — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:46:48 +0000

Are you old enough to remember how we used to celebrate President George Washington’s birthday on February 22? Until 1971, both February 12 and February 22 were federal holidays to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington respectively. In 1971, President Richard Nixon merged the two holidays into Presidents’ Day, to honor all past presidents. It’s observed every third Monday of February.

This brightly colored 1909 postcard celebrates Washington’s birthday. Profusely gilded and embossed, it was signed by postcard artist Ellen Nash. It depicts elements from the old “I cannot tell a lie” legend about Washington’s childhood, with the message reading: “Washington, his truthfulness.” See more George Washington and holiday postcards at our website.

Read about another lost holiday and see Decoration Day postcards.

Postcard Blogging and the DMCA

VintagePostcards — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 22:58:35 +0000

No, we haven’t forgotten our faithful readers. We have been on the splogging merry-go-round, attempting to get off. (For those of you who are unaware of this, our content was being systematically splogged by a spammy website in Great Britain. Snippets of everything we wrote were being used elsewhere, with no credit or backlink to us.) With the use of keywords such as v-*-n-t-*-g-e, etc., their bots (robots) even took the bait from our previous post, scraping content from us and putting up a post about their own bad behavior on their website. Hahaha, that felt great!

If you’re ever in the same boat with Google’s Blogger platform and want someone to stop stealing your copyrighted content, the simple way to do this is to go to Google’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) page. There, neatly outlined in a relatively painless seven-step process which leaves nothing to the imagination, you’ll find a blow-by-blow account of how to notify Google of infringement(s) on your Blogger posts. We’ve sent our written notification to Google and will probably keep the posting down here until the matter is concluded, lest we get splogged again by the same spammer and have to submit yet-more take-down requests. It shouldn’t take too long. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, enjoy browsing our postcard selection at VintagePostcards.org.

Read more about adventures with sploggers and content theft, and why we decided to quit using Google’s blogger platform and switch to WordPress.

Racey Helps, Postcard Artist

VintagePostcards — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:17:01 +0000

Today’s entry serves a dual purpose: to document the wonderful work of postcard artist Racey Helps, and to document splogging of our recent posts. What is splogging, you ask? It’s a form of copyright infringement on the Internet, in which people who have no qualms about stealing and/or are too clueless to write their own text, steal the text of other authors and don’t credit the copyright owner in any way. It’s a sleazy way of trying to get “keyword-rich” text without actually writing any. (It will also get you yanked off the Internet, eventually.)

Cutting to the chase, here is “keyword rich” text about vintage postcards and, in particular, the old postcards of Racey Helps. Little is known of this postcard artist, who is believed to have lived in Bristol, England. He married Renee (nee Orr) and fathered at least one child, Julian Racey Helps, who was born about 1950. Helps’ artwork was published by the Medici Society in London, England; Medici began a subscription service in 1910 whereby a subscriber could receive new prints from represented artists and by the 1930s, Medici was publishing artist-signed postcards by such well-known postcard artists as Molly Brett and Margaret Tarrant.

Racey Helps’s artwork was also widely available on postcards for many years and around 1970, his work illustrated a series of eight-page Medici booklets with titles like The Story of the Snow Prince and To Greet You: The Story of the Tea-Kettle House. The Western world was fascinated with space exploration during the Cold War of the 1950s and this interest peaked in the 1960s and 1970s with man’s first walks on the moon. Based on the charming context of this vintage postcard, we think it was published in the 1960s.

And thus ends the “keyword rich” text. Copyscape is a handy tool, allowing authors to monitor how and when their work is used on the Internet. Seldom have we needed to use it, with the exception of one misguided Wikipedian, whose excerpts from our website were removed within two hours, and one eBayer for whom things didn’t work out too well, either, when they copied a postcard guide we’d written and posted the whole thing on their eBay “Me” page.

Apparently, the webmaster of a spammy website with zero page rank (PR)has decided to try splogging us. Two of our recent postcard articles about the Fourth of July and the Civil Rights movement as seen in vintage postcards, and we want our readers to know that we didn’t authorize use of our materials on such a website. If one hovered over the postcard pictures on the web page, you would have seen (since removed, of course) that the webmaster had also “hot linked” to other peoples’ websites. Hot linking steals bandwidth for which you, the domain owner, pay. There were other links to our work about how to use the Internet to document old postcards on these pages of the website: Photo Post Card Blogs and Old Post Card.

Update, 01/21/09:

According to whois [snip]. (Note: You can look up any domain and get contact information by doing a whois search.)

Our DMCA complaint regarding the splogger was filed in August 2007. We heard nothing from the company until mid-December 2008. As we sat here with pneumonia just before Christmas and without making an appointment with us, we received an unexpected and unwelcome call from the splogger. It seems his past had caught up with him: Potential clients had found our saga. In other words, it didn’t occur to him that he might have created a problem for us with his splogging but once he had a problem, that was different. Yeah, right. Not.

His excuse was that his company had been hacked. No, you are responsible for any results stemming from a hack of your website. Besides, the alleged hack would have had to go on for three months — the amount of time we were splogged. We find it hard to believe that any company with tech support wouldn’t notice they’d been hacked for…three months. Time for a new tech support staff?

What it was, was, the company in question got caught with their hand in the Internet cookie jar and they didn’t like the consequences. Apparently, they complained to our hosting company (whom we normally like), although we haven’t been offered any correspondence relating to this so that we might address any other attendant issues. Although we highly disagree — and despite the fact that Google was aware that the content was posted on Blogger for five months after our DMCA complaint was filed and before we moved the blog to this WordPress platform — our host has requested that we remove the personally identifying information which was here, so that no one will be “harassed.” We weren’t harassed when our materials were plagiarized? We weren’t harassed when receiving a lengthy phone call over a year later while ill? We weren’t “harassed” when it took over a day of our lives trying to contact the splogger and subsequently filing a DMCA takedown complaint? You be the judge. We are happy to note, however, that the overall plight of the spammy website hasn’t really changed. Twenty months after this all started, they still have a Google page rank of zero and an Alexa page rank of 12 million. Time to hire some SEO staff? Time to develop a content-rich website? It is pretty funny in that respect. In the end, we all get what we deserve.

Unfortunately, this whole situation highlights the ease with which scrapers can scrape content from websites and blogs. Some platforms are more secure than others. We had planned to convert this blog to WordPress in the future; however, ~~we’ll be doing~~ we did that sooner than anticipated.

Browse the postcard publisher category at our website to see artwork by Albertype, the Detroit Publishing Co., Raphael Tuck, Rotograph and other well-known postcard publishers.

Learn more about our battle against copyrighted content theft, and why we switched to WordPress as our blogging platform.

Happy Fourth of July!

VintagePostcards — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:40:57 +0000

The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, is always a favorite with postcard collectors, due to the bright, bold graphics used and the attendant theme of patriotism. These post cards are often awash in firecrackers and flags. Here’s one of our favorites: a 1908 antique postcard showing a little girl in a bright red dress, holding a tiny doll and waving a small flag as sailor boys pass by. Strangely, both of the flags shown are backwards. It’s small details such as these which often add to the charm of a vintage postcard.

Although not as bright and colorful, real photo postcards (RPPCs) depicting Uncle Sam are scarce and desirable. The more fanciful and detailed, the better. Here’s a classic Uncle Sam antique postcard, also from about 1908, which is all the more desirable as it shows a child dressed as Uncle Sam. His broad smile shows the pride he feels about being chosen to wear this costume.

Enjoy the selection of Fourth of July and patriotic postcards at our website. And Happy Fourth of July!

Read another blog post about July Fourth holiday postcards.

Using the Internet to Document Postcards

VintagePostcards — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:10:50 +0000

When documenting antique postcards, it’s important not to overlook the Internet and its many resources. An example of successful use of this resource occurred recently when we documented a vintage postcard with unusual subject matter with which we were not very familiar: the German Imperial Army and, specifically, the role of black soldiers from Africa in it. All we had to go on when we started was that the old postcard was postmarked in 1914 in Potsdam, Germany.

As the story unfolded as we followed Internet links regarding Kaiser Wilhelm’s Army, we learned that this black soldier was one of only about six African soldiers serving in the German Imperial Army who were well documented in vintage postcard form, excluding real-photo postcard (RPPC) battle scenes. Ben Aisse, one of the lesser known of the six black soldiers, was a handsome Moroccan whose full name was Ben Aisse Miloud Ould Allal. In this scarce military postcard with great graphics, he poses proudly as the standard bearer of the 1st Guard Regiment in the Kaiser’s Army. Born in Zellara-Oudja, Morocco, Aisse was spotted by the Kaiser on a visit to Tangiers in 1905. Aisse, then 18, led the Kaiser part of the way through the city on horseback, impressing the Kaiser. It’s said that the Kaiser was also impressed by Aisse’s height of 6 feet, 2 inches.

In 1906, the Kaiser invited Aisse to Potsdam. Upon a return visit to Potsdam in 1907, Aisse enrolled in the 1. Garde Regiment zu Fuss (First Guard Regiment on foot) as a standard bearer, as seen above in the nicely detailed German postcard, which has excellent contrast and great clarity. By 1913, he was an NCO in this famous regiment. While he stayed back with the replacement battalion of his regiment with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he later joined the Asienkorps (Asian Corps) and served on the Palestinian front in 1917-18. He returned to his regiment’s depot in December 1918, was demobilized in 1919, and then returned home to Tangiers, having served 12 years in the Kaiser’s Army. This is the last we hear of Aisse.

See more great vintage postcards at VintagePostcards.org

Learn more about paper conservation, and how to protect your old postcards and photographs.

Dating Curteich Linen Postcards

VintagePostcards — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:47:02 +0000

We sometimes receive e’mail from postcard collectors wondering how we know the date of an unused postcard. While a date range can only be supplied with most unused old postcards, post cards published by Curteich (known as Curt Teich in earlier days) from the mid-1930s through the 1950s have an easy-to-understand built-in dating system.

Looking at the back of the motel postcard, one sees a code printed in the stamp box at top right. The code reads 2C-H3, the most important part of the code being the 2C. Curteich used an easy-to-remember numbering system for its colorful linen postcards, many of which are classic roadside Americana images. All cards from the mid-1930s on contained the letter “A”: thus, a postcard bearing the code 6A would be from 1936. “A” denoted the 1930s and 6 denoted the year 1936.

“B” series Curteich postcards were published in the 1940s: a postcard with the code 7B would have been published in 1947. “C” series postcards are from the 1950s, and thus we see that the motel postcard, coded as 2C, is from 1952.

Curteich date coding also sometimes appears on the fronts of postcards; in the case of this Route 70 postcard, the coding is at bottom right.

We’ve enlarged this code as best we can; it says 0C-H51, meaning that this post card was published in 1950. You can learn more about Dating Curt Teich Postcards at the Curt Teich postcard archives of the Lake County Forest Preserves.

See the Curteich postcards at our website.

Read about more roadside postcards.