Of Postcards and Postage

Of Postcards and Postage

I love postcards. I send them, collect them, and even make them. In my latest Flickr album, You’ve Got Mail, I included a 1939 photo of what was described as the “largest postcard ever sent through the mail.” A regular postcard cost one cent to mail in that year.

I spot an interesting error in the original caption for the photo. It states that “it took $1.50 in stamps to carry the card.” Being a stamp nerd, I wanted to get a closer look at the postage on the card. This was possible because of the high-resolution scan made from the original glass negative. Look at all the postage in the upper right corner of the postcard! When zooming in on the TIFF, I saw that at least two different stamps were used to send the card. I could make out the stamp on the right as the 1939 New York World’s Fair 3-cent stamp:

There are fifty of that stamp on the card, which alone amounts to $1.50 in postage. But there are 100 other stamps on the card to the left of the Trylon and Perisphere. I can’t see those stamps clearly enough to identify them, but from what I can see, I suspect that they could be from the presidential series of stamps first issued in 1938. But there were over twenty denominations in that series, and I can’t see the stamp clearly enough to determine which one it is:

We may never know just how much postage was needed to mail the postcard.

It seems to me that mailing postcards, large or regular-sized, is on its way to becoming a lost art.

This was not the case in the early 20^th century. Communicating with family and friends via postcards was extremely popular. In this 1906 Detroit Publishing Company photo taken in the Michigan resort town of Petoskey, I spot four separate displays of postcards. On one, the cards are advertised as 2 for 5 cents:

That price is beaten by this newsstand in New Orleans, where cards are 3 for a nickel, or 15 cents for a dozen!

I wish I could find a shop like this today. There must be thousands of cards for sale at this Cincinnati establishment:

Postcards were still popular in the 1930s as you can see in this photo from San Juan:

The young lady at this patriotically decorated stand has a number of postcards for sale, presumably of the mining activities in and around Hibbing, Minnesota:

Learn More:

• Browse the Flickr album You’ve Got Mail.
• Study a research guide on postcards.
• Read other blog entries in Picture This that include postcards.

from Picture This https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2023/03/of-postcards-and-postage/