• Collecting,  General Info,  Katheryn McMahon Newton Album

    Dearie: Introducing the Katheryn McMahon Newton Album

    With the start of the new year (2021), each blog post will focus on one or more postcards from the Katheryn McMahon Newton album. This post will introduce you to the main “characters” we’ll meet in the postcards going forward, offer an overview of the cards and album, and set forth rules about my posting. Lets start with the album, actually. I consider this one of the best deals I’ve made. I’m not going to specify the exact amount I paid, but it was one of the lowest amounts even before taking into account the number of cards the album contained. Of equal or more importance, at a guess (i.e.…

  • Miscellaneous

    How Many Pages in a Postcard Book?

    At some point in the early twentieth century, someone sent Miss Bertha Hazelton of Mooreland, Indiana, a Postcard Book. For some people, the phrase “postcard book” conjures up an image of a book of postcards: the kind of thing for sale at many tourist attractions that holds eight, twelve, sixteen, or more souvenir postcards. This isn’t that kind of postcard book. As you can see, it is quite literally a postcard featuring a small book. In person, the card appears quite flat. If it were put through a modern mechanical mail sorter, it might survive–so long as it went through the right way. The wrong way would risk tearing off…

  • General Info,  Puzzles

    A Musical Mystery? Crack an old Postcard Code

    Shorthand and use of non-English languages reduced the number of people who might read a given post card. Nevertheless, senders still ran the risk of postal workers and others (family members, friends, neighbors) being able to read the cards. Perhaps more the case with non-English languages sent from or delivered to ethnic and/or diverse neighborhoods, but more people may have been able to read shorthand then than now. And then there are codes. It will likely come as no surprise that some people used codes to communicate through postcards. With codes, the recipient had to have the key to decipher the message–but codes likely defeated casual readers. As a matter…

  • Collecting,  General Info,  Puzzles

    Keeping Secrets? Messages in Shorthand on Postcards

    Last post introduced Clara Stahl and Agnes Naylor, two stenographers in Grinnell, Iowa, in the early twentieth century. Both collected postcards, and agreed to exchange cards (i.e. send them to each other) to help increase their respective collections. We know this thanks to a typewritten card Clara sent to Agnes. Typewritten cards offered highly legible messages for recipients to read. (Typewritten messages are also much appreciated by many historians.) Clara clearly didn’t mind anyone and everyone reading that message. Nor did she likely worry about messages she composed in handwritten English. After all, the very nature of postcards meant anyone who got their hands on one–such as a postal worker…

  • Collecting,  General Info

    Typewritten Irregularities: Filling a Postcard in Type

    If you sat down to write a postcard and send it, how would you fill the space. With a pencil? Ink pen? Marker? Crayon? How about typing? True, in the modern world we can design postcards and have them printed, but this wasn’t an option at the turn of the twentieth century. The vast majority of postcards that I’ve seen have handwritten messages, in pencil or ink, sometimes crayon. (As an aside, my personal preference is ink pen because pencil messages can be a pain to decipher.) There are some with pre-printed messages or blank forms (I’ll share some here sooner or later) and others with stamped messages, as in…

  • Business,  Collecting,  Travel

    Special Rate Train Trip Tennessee to California–Write Today for Particulars!

    Many a marketing and/or advertisement campaign included postcards. I’ve got a variety of postcards advertising one or another product, plus various postcards announcing gift subscriptions, and more. Today, however, I’m focusing on a travel tourism endeavor for which I happen to have not one but two connected postcards sent to the same person. The recipient was Emma Looney, then living in Decherd, Tennessee. Alas, in her case the U.S. Census is not particularly helpful. I have 78 postcards from an album she kept, but there’s no ready match for her in 1900 given the dates of the postcards and names/initials of family members versus the potential hits in the Census;…

  • Collecting,  Real Photo Post Cards

    Housewives and Handiwork: Tracking Domestic Friendships Through a Doily

    Something a bit different for this third Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) in a row — there’s not a person in sight. People used cameras and postcards to document and share all manner of things including dead pets (I don’t own any, but I’ve seen them), caterpillars under canvas (from a research site), and . . . doilies. I don’t know enough about handicrafts such as this to say much about it. What follows here is largely speculation. If you look closely, you can see the cloth features a rose pattern. It may be damask or some other heavier fabric, for whomever cut, trimmed, and hemmed it managed to make a…

  • Real Photo Post Cards,  Vitals

    Real Photo of Man in Fallen Tree, Per Promise

    Real Photo Postcards (RPPC) are pains and joys in collecting early postcards, at least from my perspective. On the good side: they show “real” people and scenes as their name indicates. Many are posed (hence the use of quotes above) but they’re also often intended to be shared between families, friends, and acquaintances, particularly RPPC of people. Those may represent intricate networks of connections. Frustratingly, such cards also frequently lack sufficient information to tease out the networks. My collection contains more RPPC than I like with nothing written on the front or back. Whomever gathered the cards and placed them in albums knew the subject and/or meaning and didn’t need…

  • Collecting,  Miscellaneous,  Real Photo Post Cards,  Vitals

    Remembered Love: Death and Real Photo Post Cards (RPPC)

    First post – birth; second post – marriage (proposal); so, yes, this third post is about death. More specifically, it’s about sharing news of death. Yet in sending this card, Angus M. Baker memorialized his late wife Rosa E. Merly/Merley/Mesley Baker–and tells us quite a bit about life, death, and postcards. Let’s start with the card itself. Angus Baker provided his wife’s vital dates: birth, marriage, and death. Rosa married at age 28 and died seven years later. He doesn’t tell us what she died of, merely that it was “[a]fter a short illness.” This information survives by way of a Real Photo Post Card (RPPC) which presumably shows Rosa…

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