Postcards from the Edge

It all started in 1977. My best friend Nancy and I were knocking around downtown Portland, Oregon, where we attended college, and we wandered into the Greyhound bus depot, as one might do in those days. There was a rack of postcards, and I pulled out a 3-D postcard of The Last Supper. It became the first of a collection that has spanned four-plus decades and most of the continents.

I don’t collect just any postcards. I became attracted to postcards that were a little off-kilter, tongue in cheek, but not obscene, not antique in particular, but acceptable if they fit into my particular aesthetic, which was basically tacky. I grew to love the ‘Greetings from…’ postcards with maps of the states with cartoon pictures of representative items. I love the ‘large letter’ postcards with images inside the letters that spell out the state. I developed a fondness for the images of fur-bearing trout, jackalopes, and giant ears of corn that fill an entire pickup truck. Deckled edges are a bonus.

I found that collecting postcards was a perfect hobby for someone who loves to travel. They are inexpensive, take up almost no space, and give you something to keep an eye out for when you are on the road. As friends learned of this interest of mine they started sending me postcards that they found when they traveled. When I look through my collection now and read the backs of them, it is like traveling back through my life. Even reading the addresses where people mailed them to me is a reminiscence of where I lived once upon a time.

As my collection grew I found that I needed a way to store them and to group them by category. I found some photo storage boxes that work perfectly and developed my own organization system. I have index cards with tabs that separate the cards into sections with names like ‘Fish Stories’, ‘Wonder Produce’, ‘At the Seashore’, ‘Signs & Symbols’, ‘Oddities’. Then there is the Novelty category for postcards that are in the shape of a London taxi cab, contain a bag of copper ore, have a message in braille or a flamenco dancer wearing a costume with actual embroidery and ruffles added on. Once I found two postcards that were jigsaw puzzles, one of a steer in a field and one with a cat with the title ‘Sitting Pretty’. I discovered that they were cut from the same die and that I could interchange the pieces to make one image -

I call it ‘Cat and Cow Pose’. If I ever have a little smile on my face when we do that combination of movements in yoga class, that is why.

Sometime in the late 1980’s I came across a book by Klutz Press called The World’s Tackiest Postcards. It not only had the images of the postcards, but they were actual perforated postcards that could be pulled out and sent, though I never have. On the back inside cover was this call for entries -

There was no date on it so I had no idea if the deadline had come and gone, but I went ahead and made color copies of a couple dozen of my favorites, wrote a letter describing my collection, and sent it off. A couple weeks later I got a letter back saying that I had passed the first hurdle and that they would like me to send the originals, which would later be returned. Some months passed, but I finally received the notification that out of ‘tens of thousands’ of entries, I was one of ten people whose postcards had been selected for the sequel.

I will spare you the image of the postcard that put me over the top because it is kind of gruesome and would offend anyone out there who is a vegetarian, but suffice it to say that it came from a slaughterhouse in Broome, Australia

(I did not visit the slaughterhouse, but found the postcard on a rack at the Broome chamber of commerce) (another story for another blog).

In the late 1990’s I was living in Corvallis, Oregon, and was working as a volunteer at the Corvallis Art Center. One day the director of the center came over to my house and was looking around, and eventually came to learn about my postcard collection. She thought it would be great to have an exhibit of my collection and proposed the idea to me. I didn’t think it would be very interesting to just have a bunch of postcards displayed, so I came up with a couple ideas.

I was offered two small venues - one at the Benton County Historical Museum and one at the art center itself. At the museum I was given a museum case about five feet long and the wall space above it. For the museum case I collected some vintage road maps and used them as a base for the map postcards, one from every state, laid out in alphabetical order.

For the wall above the case I painted a 4 foot by 6 foot map of the United States as a giant ‘Greetings from…’ postcard. I wanted to fill it with postcards that featured unusual claims to fame, at least one in each state. To fill in any gaps from my collection I contacted chambers of commerce all over the country and told them what I was looking for. I was deluged with promo packets filled with not only postcards, but brochures and articles, and even a glow-in-the-dark bumper sticker from the Firefly Capital of Boone, NC.

For the space that I was given art the art center I decided to make three shrines, each of which would feature one of the categories in my collection. This involved building a structure for the shrines, choosing the postcards to use and making copies of them, and finding other objects to round out the displays. My sister Patty even made a trip from Denver up to Douglas, Wyoming, the Jackalope Capital, to find paraphernalia to add to that shrine.

A Rare Find

Gone Fishing

Home Sweet Home

While I was in the research phase in preparing for this exhibit I learned that the largest printer of postcards had been the Curt Teich company that operated from 1898 to 1978 in Chicago. The Curt Teich archives, which consisted of over two million postcards and original artwork from all of their cards was housed at the Lake County Museum in Wauconda, Illinois. Since I grew up near there and had family in the area, I figured a research trip was in order.

I contacted the conservator of the collection, who was extremely friendly and helpful. She asked what types of postcards I was interested in seeing and said that she would pull examples from the collection for me, AND that I could make color copies of any of them that I liked. It turned out that they had cards arranged in categories much as I did, though often with different names. When I described the giant vegetables, for example, she said, ‘Oh, you mean the Larger than Life’ category.' What I thought was just my own quirky little habit turned out to be a whole world unto itself with serious collectors, conferences, and so on. I looked into all of this a little bit, but decided I would rather just keep it as my own quirky little habit and not take it too seriously.

The conservator and I had a lovely day together and I left with a treasure trove of images, many of which became a part of my exhibit. She asked me if I would consider letting my pieces be shown at their museum as well. So I built shipping crates for all the pieces and they traveled to Illinois. The shrines were returned to me after their show, but the museum bought the ‘Greetings from…’ painting to use as an educational display. My postcards can be removed and postcards of other topics can be put up, such as National Parks or agricultural products to teach kids about these things.

I’ve never counted how many postcards I have, and the collection evolves anyway, but even though it is well into the multi-hundreds, if not thousands, it all fits neatly into a few photo boxes on one shelf in my house. It is harder to find the kinds of postcards I like these days on racks in gas stations and such, but sometimes when traveling across the country I still find one tucked in the back from the old days.

For a number of years I handmade about a hundred of my own Christmas postcards that riffed off of one in my collection. I would have to drag my former husband out to take some pictures for it, and the project was pretty time consuming. But it wasn’t unusual to have friends tell me that getting that card in the mail was their favorite part of Christmas -

Cheers!