By Lisa Hix — Compared with the sophisticated technology Russia employed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, the Soviet propaganda in "Brutal Bloc Postcards," published by FUEL Design and Publishing, seems downright quaint. Many of these postcards, published by governments of the U.S.S.R. between the 1960s and 1980s, depict the bland, 1960s five-story concrete-paneled apartments known as "khrushchyovka" as if to say, "Look at the modern wonder of collective worker housing!" To Westerners, the boxy...

Home in a Can: When Trailers Offered a Compact Version of the American Dream

By Lisa Hix — Mobile homes have a bad rap. The minute you utter the words, "trailer park," many people will come back with stereotypes about "trailer trash," or slovenly, ignorant, beer-swilling yokels who leave busted appliances and inoperable cars outside their mobile homes. The "trailer trash" caricature has been all over pop culture the past few decades—from Cousin Eddie in the "Vacation" movie series to Jeff Foxworthy's redneck comedy to "The Trailer Park Boys" TV and movie series. And the animosity...

Roadside Curiosities: Things That Make You Go "What the Heck?"

By Lisa Hix — In the introduction to his new self-published book of vernacular photography and tourist postcards, "In Situ: American Folk Art in Place," archivist and collector Jim Linderman, who's known for his Dull Tool Dim Bulb blog, warns that these images he's gathered "don't belong together at all. My arbitrary curating criteria is a falsehood." "You know, he is kind of eccentric, and his yard is full of all sorts of things." Yet his oddball collection makes perfect sense: When wandering North...

How Linen Postcards Transformed the Depression Era Into a Hyperreal Dreamland

By Ben Marks — For people who did not live in the United States during the 1930s and ’40s, the most familiar depictions of those decades come from two notoriously unreliable sources. First, there are the movies, in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and a scattering of Marx Brothers sing, dance, solve who-done-its, and make us laugh until our sides ache. Despite the inherent artificiality of Hollywood motion pictures of that era, especially during the 1930s, we can...

Zen Nouveau: New Year's Greetings from Early 20th-Century Japan

By Ben Marks — The recent exhibition at the Asian Art Museum titled “Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists” shines a light on how the opening of Japan to the West in the 1850s spurred the late 19th-century European preoccupation for all things Japanese. But inspiration also traveled in the other direction, as seen in these turn-of-the-20th-century Japanese postcards from the collection of U.S. postcard collector Ken Reed. According to Reed, who cautions that he’s “not...

When Postcards Made Every Town Seem Glamorous, From Asbury Park to Zanesville

By Ben Marks — From the 1930s through the 1950s, tourists taking their first road trips in their newfangled automobiles would frequently stop along the way to pick up a few colorful postcards to mail to the folks back home. The most popular form of eat-your-heart-out greeting was the large-letter postcard, which had been around since the first part of the 20th century but whose heyday was during what we know today as the linen-postcard era. Made of textured paper rather than actual cloth, linen postcards...

In Living Color: The Forgotten 19th-Century Photo Technology that Romanticized America

By Ben Marks — Every few centuries, someone rediscovers America. After the first humans arrived from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago, Vikings touched down in Newfoundland in the year 1000. Half a millennium later, Christopher Columbus spotted a small island in what is now the Bahamas, and in 1769, Gaspar de Portolà was the first European to gaze upon San Francisco Bay, whose indigenous people had remained hidden behind a thick wall of fog throughout most of America’s Colonial era. “Photochroms were a...

The Real Mermaids of San Marcos, Texas

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — The springs of the San Marcos River in central Texas have plenty of extraordinary traits: Each day, they release about 100 million gallons of water, forming the life source for one of the longest-inhabited places in North America. They're also the primary habitat for several endangered species, including a blind salamander found nowhere else on earth. Yet the most magical thing about the San Marcos springs is actually no longer there—its unique submersible theater, or "Aquarena," which once...

Fundraising Postcard for the Graf Zeppelin

By Dave Short — Immediately following World War I, the German economy was in shambles as it struggled to pay heavy war reparations. The German people suffered greatly under a shortage of consumer goods and hyperinflation. Even the once proud Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin Corporation had to fight for its existence. The few remaining zeppelins in its fleet were given to the Allies, and there was a push to have the company dismantled because of its part in the war. Since German companies were forbidden from...

Walker Evans, Preeminent Photographer and Passionate Postcard Collector

By Dave Margulius — In 1994, I had the great pleasure of acquiring the complete archive of Walker Evans for the Metropolitan Museum. The archive is quite vast, including 30,000 black-and-white negatives and about 10,000 color transparencies. It includes collections of his business and personal correspondence, both letters he sent as well as those he received. It also includes his library and his collections. He had works of art by other artists, and a lot of vernacular material, including metal and wood...

When Postcards Were the Social Network

By Maribeth Keane — I worked for 35 years as a reference librarian with the Madison Public Library and I just got interested in Madison’s history through my reference work. My husband and I collect antiques of various sorts, and as we would go to antique stores or antique shows in malls, I began looking through boxes of old postcards. I just started buying Madison postcards to learn about Madison history. I’m not a Madison native. I didn’t move to Madison until 1964, but I say I’ve adopted Madison as my...

Attending the Theatre, Via Postcards

By Marty Weil — Andreas Praefcke (Ravensburg, Germany) collects postcards of old and new theatre buildings worldwide. His complete collection can be seen on his website Carthalia. I spoke to him recently about how he got interested in this unique and interesting postcard collecting theme, how he finds cards, and what some of his favorites are. : How did you become interested in collecting postcards featuring Theater buildings? : Probably my greatest passion is going to the opera wherever and...