CardCow Vintage Postcard Blog

  Just received a copy of this book.  If you're a collector of California postcards, or you've looked through southern California cards at a show you've most likely seen some of these serigraph cards . I had always thought the artist was Margaret Sheehan, since most of the cards are identified as "Published by M. A. Sheehan, Topanga California" on the back. But these distinctive cards are actually attributed to Paul Dubosclard. Although many are unsigned, a handful have a P. Dubosclard name or stamp on the front:     Many cards also have hand-written titles in pencil, presumably by Dubosclard. The bulk of the book is a catalog of all known works by Dubosclard, highlighting details about many individual cards and the series (US Presidents, State Flags, and Zodiac).  So this serves as a "checklist" for collectors, but also shows a beautifully artistic compilation of different variations of the same serigraphs, as well as showing other similar postcard view

 It's a lot of fun to see what the places on old postcards look like now. We added gallery page of old & new views to highlight these views via Google Street View. Have a current street view for a card to share?  Click the "Ask a Question" link on any detail page to submit a street view link.

We just published this tool for doing partial match searches for US City & State Names: https://www.cardcow.com/city-lookup/ This is especially useful for postcard collectors and postal historians for identifying locations when you might have a few letters from a postmark or maybe the writing is unclear. This comes up often in the Photo Postcards RPPC Unidentified Images  Facebook group.  This week a member posted this unidentified real photo card: Not a lot to go on, except the sender writes that one of the buildings is the "First National Bank".  That doesn't narrow it down much. Luckily, they also posted the back of the card: This gives us a few more clues.  Maybe Wisconsin?  Or related to Mammie Miller? At first glance, the postmark doesn't look decipherable, with only 3 or 4 letters and no state: Is it WAPO?  NAFO?  NARO?  Hard to say. But, the A is most likely in the middle of the word, and there are most likely only 4 or 5 letters on either side of the A. 

Interesting little documentary on "Same Sky" chrome postcards from Dexter Press.  We probably have a ton of these in here somewhere.   You can see some earlier "photoshop" type manipulation of the original photos in the postcard production process - we don't have much from chrome-era though.

Ebay made some major changes to the Postcards category this month.  Here I show some of the changes and how to update your saved searches to filter the correct state, country or category.

 Nice display at the Los Altos History Museum featuring fruit crate labels, vintage photos and a Linen-era postcard of the orchards in Santa Clara county.