Navigating the picture post card scene
These collectable mementos of people’s travels come in bewildering myriad forms
DELTIOLOGISTS will descend on the summer Art & Antiques for Everyone fair at the Birmingham NEC later this month to spend hours rifling through box after box of postcards, each one searching for those particularly rare examples from their chosen area of collecting. See panel.
For the collector who’s as fastidious as a librarian in a bookshop, with a limited budget and even less space to spare, the postcard is the perfect medium. Whisper it, but we’ll be searching for novelty cards in general and one specific type in particular, which not everyone has heard of.
That’s the other joy of deltiology: there is such an incredibly diverse range of categories, and while it’s possible to pay £50 or more for some, thousands of others can be had for prices starting at 50p.
Sad to say, too few of the best novelty cards survive today, but the search goes on. Look for cards embossed with numerous stamps or coins. They were often sold in sets and the quality of the German chromolithographic printing is so good, the stamps and coins look confusingly real.
Consequently, they also appeal to philatelists and numismatists.
Boots Cash Chemists produced some of the latter, printed with silver and bronze inks showing the coins of various European countries, together with conversion charts to aid late 19th
and early 20th century tourists.
Composite sets of as many as 10 or 12 cards were produced, which when placed together in a square or oblong, reveal a much larger scene or portrait.
These so-called instalment or sectional sets, one to be sent each day, for example, were often puzzles to keep the recipient guessing, while in the case of one well-known example called the Birmingham Express, when the six cards are placed end to end, they show the complete locomotive and five carriages.
Double-image puzzle cards show, for example, dogs when the card is sloped to the left and cats and a face in the moon when sloped to the right.
Others have mirror writing, one example showing an unhappy suitor. When held up to a mirror, the text reads “Never got that letter from you”.
Cut-out cards have holes for fingers to be inserted to give “legs” to bathing belles, or a bulbous nose to a cleric or rotund mother-in-law. Pull-outs, meanwhile, have a concertina-like pack of views revealed when a flap on the front of the card is lifted.
Kaleidoscope cards are particularly ingenious. Some are based on dancers in exotic costumes. One particularly Clockwise from above: An illuminated card by Wolff Hagelberg showing the harbour at Gruss by night; an illuminated card showing the Palais de Dolma-Bagche, Constantinople; a seemingly well-travelled French postcard decorated with multiple “stamps” and a view of La Place de la Concorde – postmarked 1913 – and “We are ‘going the pace” at Oxford”, a novelty with 12 views of the city under a lift-up flap
amusing novelty is the “Write Away” card that has an illustration and a “handwritten” message on the front intended to start the sender off with a witty one-liner. An example shows a dog running away with a bather’s trousers and the text “Owing to unavoidable circumstances …” He then adds suitable words to complete the joke.
Other novelties include cards that, for example, squeak when a mechanism in the card is squeezed; others that open to allow a spring to pop up at the startled reader, and erotic cards that, this being a family newspaper, we won’t go into. Our favourite, though, remains the so-called hold-to-light card, a number of which we found years ago before we really knew much about them. The magic images the novelties reveal when light is shone behind them were enough to ensure they entered our collection of printed ephemera, never to be parted with.
In the most common examples (although all hold-to-lights are now becoming scarce) the windows in landmark buildings become apparently illuminated. In others, the hidden image can actually be seen on the reverse. This was usually printed in black on white card, like a silhouette, so that it would show readily through the translucent paper.
Others were either blank front and back or else had blank vignettes worked into thechro mo lithographed design. These have to be held to the light in order to see any image whatsoever and often featured risqué scenes of which maiden aunts would disapprove.
A host of effects were created this way – a child sleeping with eyes closed is suddenly wide awake. Seemingly extinct volcanoes now erupt, while an owl roosting by daylight is woken by a full moon and stars in an otherwise dark night sky.
The technique used to create the effects is simple, but in the early Victorian era when the best hold-to-lights appeared, it was highly demanding.
They were made by sandwiching cut and printed paper, relying on the perfect alignment of two images, one each side of the card, and the use of translucent printing paper to allow the image on the reverse to be superimposed over that on the front.
German printers were masters of earlychro mo lithography, notably Wolff Hagelberg, active in Berlin from 1870-1890, who also had shops in London from 1885 and New York from 1889, such was the size of his business.
A Hagelberg in our own collection is signed by the artist Helena Maguire and shows a boy asleep in the grass. It reads: “When light of day shall thro’ this pictures stream/A bird will wake the sleeper from his dream!” On the mount, Tom, the sender has written, “May the bird have good news oh sister Emily”.