Vintage Hallmark Cards

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Though known today for its greeting cards, Hallmark actually began as a small reseller of postcards, which proliferated in the United States after Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act of 1898, ending the government’s monopoly on...
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Though known today for its greeting cards, Hallmark actually began as a small reseller of postcards, which proliferated in the United States after Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act of 1898, ending the government’s monopoly on pre-stamped postcards and lowered the rate for mailing postcards to a penny. A subsequent decision in 1907 on the part of the U.S. Postal Service to allow postcards to be addressed on their back sides, leaving the fronts for photographs or art, marked the beginning of the postcard's golden era. That was the market that enticed brothers Joyce, Rollie, and William Hall in 1907 to go into business as postcard jobbers—naturally, the company was named Hall Brothers—taking orders from retailers in and around their hometown of Norfolk, Nebraska, and on up to the Black Hills of South Dakota. That was also the start of the Norfolk Post Card Company, which, by the end of 1907, was also publishing a few postcards of its own, mostly featuring photographs of scenes and places of interest in Norfolk. By the end of 1908, the enterprise had grown to include a retail outlet called Hall's Book Store, which sold books, magazines, candy, and novelties in addition to giving the brothers a base for its jobbing business. Soon, though, the Norfolk Post Card Company was too big to be run out of the store's stock room. At the same time, it was clear that Norfolk would only get the brothers so far in the jobbing business. The big city beckoned, and after briefly considering Omaha as a new base of operations, in 1910 Joyce Hall struck out for Kansas City, Missouri. There, the business grew, though money was always tight. It got even tighter in 1912, when the postcard craze crashed, due in part to the proliferation of folded greeting, birthday, Valentine's Day, and Christmas cards, which cost only a penny more than a postcard to send through the mail. The Hall Brothers quickly got into that market as jobbers, too, but a fire in 1915, which wiped out...
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