Precious paper: Postcards from the past at S.F. fair
If you’re planning to write a book on the history of Petaluma, the place to be on Sunday afternoon was not Petaluma.
It was the Vintage Paper Fair in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where old picture postcards were going for either 25 cents or $475, depending on which bin you poked around in.
Alice Van Ommeren, who has already collected hundreds of postcards to illustrate her books on the history of Yosemite hotels and Stockton, has turned her collecting skills on Petaluma.
“It’s a way to get historical images for plain people like me. It’s affordable,” Van Ommeren, 54, said as she flipped through the $10-andunder cards offered for sale by Marty and Betty Michaels of San Jose.
Even so, Betty Michaels steered her attention to an adjacent display case. That one had a tempting Prohibition-era postcard featuring an auditorium and a banner reading “A Saloonless Nation 1920,” going for $175. And next to that, under glass, sat a stylized lithograph of the entertainer and political activist Josephine Baker, also from the ’20s. Its price tag was $475.
Van Ommeren laughed and turned back to her treasure hunt.
“Some collectors are willing to spend thousands of dollars on a single postcard,” said Marty Michaels, returning from a cigarette break outside the San Francisco County Fair Building, where the show is held three times a year. A retired executive with Philips Semiconductors, Michaels discovered postcards 35 years ago when someone gave him a box of them. He loved the artwork and began to collect them and sell the ones he didn’t want.
For postcard collectors, it’s all about the picture on the card, not the note some long-ago correspondent sent to his Uncle Harold. Most of the postcards at the fair had no message, including one that had been mailed, in February 1908, to a Mrs. Agnes Mitteywood, West Salisbury, RFD, Vermont. Yet the gold script on the front of the card made clear the sender’s sentiment: “To my Valentine.”
Postcards weren’t the only paper at the paper fair.
Photos count as paper, and Hal Lutsky, the fair’s promoter since 2001, had just picked up an old album from the 1930s at one of the booths. Flipping through the album’s fragile black pages, he turned to the series of six pictures that attracted him to the book. In each one, an elegant woman in a black dress, her face in soft focus, caresses a gaping human skull.
“Weird is good when it comes to collecting,” said Lutsky, who figures he can get about $200 for the album online.
Paper lovers, Sherwood Donahue has discovered, especially love paper with sex and crime on it.
“Complete and unexpurgated!” proclaimed the cover of “Rogue Women,” a 1967 first-edition by Nicholas Cutter that Donahue was selling in a bin of bawdy books. “Rogue Women” was priced to sell: $4.
“People do like looking at them,” Donahue said. “You read two paragraphs, and you’re hooked.”
More lucrative for Donahue’s vintage business were the old mug shots from more than a hundred years ago that hinted at sad stories: 17-year-old Jewel Wilkins, who stole a motorcycle in Los Angeles and was sent to jail for three years and fined $500. The teen’s mug shot — front and profile — was going for $75. The mug shot of a burglar, sentenced to 50 years in San Quentin for writing a bad check for a car in 1908, was priced at $60.
Arlene Miles of San Francisco, a retired librarian, came to look for cat postcards. But not just any run-of-the-mill cat postcards.
“Mainzer cats,” Miles said. These are cats that an artist named Eugen Hartung drew with clothing on and performing human antics. Alfred Mainzer published them in the first half of the 20th century.
“I get excited when I come in the door — I don’t know what I’m going to find!” Miles said. “It’s a very exciting day for me.”
Van Ommeren was also excited.
“Look!” she said, pointing at an old black-andwhite postcard. “The First Baptist Church of Petaluma!”
And just $5.