For some, collecting baseball postcards is as important as collecting baseball cards. Mike Franks is someone who is devoted to postcards and baseball. In his article he helps us understand the evolution of postcards showing baseball.
Chrome cards like these, that help us remember life in the 1950s and 1960s, are fast becoming difficult to find. Oh, how soon we forget! Pretty soon they’ll be as scarce as the cards from previous decades — and almost as scarce as the products they advertised.
Postcard History is a free online magazine dedicated to vintage and historic picture postcards and the many stories associated with them.
We feature richly illustrated articles designed to both inform and entertain postcard collectors and history buffs.
We also provide the most comprehensive listing of forthcoming shows around.
And there’s a rich trove of links to institutional and personal online postcard collections. There’s also a comprehensive, verified listing of active postcard clubs in the U. S. and Canada, which we’re working on expanding worldwide.
The first of our two short Sunday articles in “In a Few Words” focuses on a small group of Midwesterners who, in the early 190
0s, started the Congregational Summer Assembly in lower Michigan on the shore between Lake Michigan and Crystal Lake, just north of the small town of Frankfort. One family built “A Cottage Named Naše Bouda,” which is Czech for “Our Hut.”
In 1870, Frederic Edwin Church, a prominent member of the Hudson River School of artists, started construction of a much grander family home. Even as the Hudson River School’s grip on American art faded, Church still commanded huge commission fees and his home, Olana, is today considered a monument to the romantic realism that Church embodied.
An important fact is missing from the story of Ion Perdicaris that Postcard History published on December 5th. In the early 1970s, the Perdicaris story was discovered by Hollywood, which in its fashion liberally reworked the details. The scriptwriters apparently thought that a balding and bearded Perdicaris wasn’t a romantic enough character for a block-buster movie, so they turned “Ion” into “Eden” and cast Candice Bergen in the role! The movie was The Wind and the Lion and Sean Connery played the kidnapper Raisuli. IMDb gives the film 4 stars.
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he French postcard artist Albert Bergeret produced a series of 20 illustrated postcards from his base in Nancy, France. The series, Les Femmes de l’Avenir (Women of the Future), has its risqué elements. Take a look at women of the future.
Journalists producing articles like “How Selfies Killed the Postcard” should have their own niche, like “Man Bites Dog” and “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” Here’s a good example of the genre, a short essay complete with family anecdotes.
The New York Times seems to have a thing for the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York. In December sixth’s issue of the online edition, they published a review of their postcard show. Headlined “Tracing Lost New York Through Postcards,” the article highlights several collectors and the reasons why the collect what they do.
Mount Rushmore is one of America’s most well known and admired memorials. In spite of its popularity the story is not well known. This bit of American History is well recorded in Bob Toal’s postcard collection.
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