postcards

I sent out my cards on time this year and was rather proud of myself. But a bit disappointed too. I picked 3 packs at the end of 2008 (on sale of course, another reason to be proud,) but each one had the same cards. Not overly creative, but I do send religious ones when appropriate, Santa and elves to those with kiddles, and off-the-wall, humorous ones to good friends who I know expect that of me.

I fondly reminisce about watching my mommy get her cards out. She always used green and red pens, it was “the thing to do”, you know. And she would buy the boxes of 25 cards, the ones with a full selection. Each card had to have a special message to the person or family. I recall one time that she found one with hands on the front, clapping for the holiday season. She laughed out loud and said she had the perfect family to send it to – the Fingers! Yes, she had a friend, I believe her name was Eileen, husband was Rudy, and they had three kids. I don’t remember their names, but they would sign it “the five Fingers.”

Her sisters and brother were given very loving cards, and she’d sign with a bit of nostalgia that would remind them of growing up together. She would do what I do (or I copy her) and send the ones with elves and the North Pole to those folks with little children.

My card-sending brought back such a smile that I toddled down to the basement to see what cards I might find in my “vintage greeting card” box. And boy, was I pleasantly surprised! There were quite a few. I have saved them, not caring if another name was signed inside. In fact it seemed more charming that way to know that they actually had fulfilled their purpose and delivered holiday greetings. Some that I found were actually post cards, nicely embossed and quite beautiful. One that I found would have been a treat for mom. It shows kids on a sled and the verse included “the handclasp of a friend.” She could have sent that to the Fingers. That card was dated 1919 and had a penny stamp.

Another postcard type had a 2 cents stamp (1926) and also a stamp from that year’s Tuberculosis (TB) fund drive.

A New Years Card from 1910 had a lot of fancy work and foil! The oldest one I found was from 1906 and showed a wooden cross with flowers (morning glories I think) and was embossed as well.

The names definitely shows their age too. Mabel, Ruth, Clarence, Ada, Bernice, Helen, Elsie, Hugo, Norman, Ernest and the like. A bit different from the Madisons, Tiffanys and Brittanys of today.

I decided to put a bunch of these old cards on the coffee table for friends and family to enjoy! They fit nicely in a wooden bowl I had with painted pine-cones and the best part is that I don’t have to worry if the younger grandchildren pick them up. I try so hard not to be the grandma that screams “Don’t Touch That” and always leave my precious items way up high.

It was a fun trip down memory lane and to remember simpler times. I’ll leave you with my mother’s favorite holiday saying “Never a Christmas Morning, Never an Old Year Ends, But Someone Thinks of Someone, Old Days, Old Times, Old Friends.”

I adore Cliff Aliperti. I ought to be jealous; he does what most of us dream of — making a full-time living off doing what he loves, dealing with collectibles. But in this case, my envy over such a lifestyle is overcome by my feelings of camaraderie with Cliff who identifies himself as a obsessed, addicted, collector-historian with definite hoarder tendencies.

#1 How did you get interested in collecting and what do you collect?

I started collecting baseball cards like a lot of kids when I was about 7 years old. My dad had collected cards as a kid (and some of his survived), then comic books, and was seriously into stamps and eventually came back to baseball cards himself. My Uncle has been a baseball card dealer since 1979. Beyond baseball cards, growing up I had spurts of collecting stamps, coins, newspapers, and more and in adulthood have gone the sports collectible route, rediscovered comic books, collected modern first editions for a bit. I like clutter. I mean I have collections that I barely put effort into but somehow amount to enough items to create a collection — pens and book ends come to mind. I like having it all, by this I mean, if I’ve got something, I want more of it then all of it. I tend to take my interests to extremes.

Now I think of myself mostly as a dealer — I tend to think of my collection as the items I archive on my web sites as I sell them. So in that general sense I collect Movie Cards and Collectibles from the Silent Age through the Golden Age and General Magazine Back Issues from the Nineteenth Century to present. More specifically, I do have a small but varied collection of items featuring the 1930s and 40s actor Warren William — those aren’t for sale. My collections tend to be the tiniest slice of a niche. I’m not active at it now, but I was collecting information, articles, ephemera and trinkets related to President James K. Polk at one time too. I also have my DVD collection, though I tend to only think of vintage items as those I’ve collected.

Warren William Film Poster

#2 What is the ‘crown jewel’ of your collection?

Tough question. My dealer mentality says everything is for sale… But I guess my favorites right now are a couple of movie posters featuring Warren William that I’m trying to figure out how to frame at a reasonable cost. Actually I know how, but have been putting off getting the materials for a long time.

#3 What’s your criteria for selling vs. keeping? Is it difficult to make such decisions?

It’s pretty much all for sale. I don’t buy anything, even items for my little Warren William or James K. Polk collections, without knowing I can flip it for more than I paid. If you’re working on a budget you’ve got to have rules, that’s mine.

#4 What two characteristics or personal traits you feel are essential to being a collector?

No wrong answer here, though lots of different ones. I think it’s going to come down to what the person you ask believes about themselves, and so I’ll say 1) Attention to detail. What’s the use of putting a collection together if you aren’t taking a deep interest in the subject of the collection. You want to know it all and you’re hunting down any loose info in your spare hours. 2) Storage space.

#5 As a collector/dealer, what’s the one thing you cannot live without?

Nowadays, I’d say my internet connection. It blows my mind that back when I did baseball card shows I used to rely on a couple of magazine & trade paper subscriptions and attending shows where I’d either see the same buyers (or sellers, depending on which side of the table I was on). If my internet goes down for any length of time, I’m probably out of business.

Kromo Gravure Trading Card of Mary Pickford c.1917

#6 How many hours a week do you think you spend collecting? (This includes, but is not limited to: shopping for items to purchase, admiring or talking about your collection, blogging/writing about your collection, attending shows/events, researching, dusting. Feel free to give breakdowns &/or rationalizations if you’d like.)

Hah, basically you want my work week. Well, it’s pretty crazy, but it’s filled with passion and I love it. Every waking hour is close to the correct answer here, but I’d say an accurate count would be about 12-16 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week. I prepare sales listings during the afternoon, which also consists of researching items. I tackle blog posts, at Vintage Meld & Profiles & Premiums & for example, and my column at the Examiner.com at night. I do most of the work on my static web sites over the weekends. I keep very busy, and again, it’s great!

#7 We’ve all heard that eBay killed the mom & pop antiques store/mall… Do you agree? Disagree?

Killed it? No. Antiques and Collectibles dealers have never had so much opportunity in history. I can recall before I ever did anything online going into a rare book shop in the neighborhood and being excited when I saw the elderly proprietor entering items for sale into his computer as I browsed. My Uncle, the card show dealer, he’s the one who first showed me eBay sometime in ‘99 and I was completely blown away. If the mom & pop antique mall is dead or dying chalk it up to progress. We can lament the death of the VHS tape too, or we can buy a DVD, Blu-Ray or just download the damn thing. Take advantage of the available resources and more possibilities can open up than ever before.

#8 We all have our usual collector haunts online (websites, communities, blogs etc.), places we regularly read &/or ‘talk’ at. Please list your top three for us.

Hah, most definitely twitter, @moviecollector and @andotherstuff. I comment as often as is relevant on Marty Weil’s ephemera blog. And NewspaperArchive.com.

Vintage Look Magazine With Marilyn Monroe Cover

#9 Do you have collecting ‘bibles’?

A The Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide made me a good deal of money when it came out, pointing out key magazine issues often overlooked by online sellers. Now I just found Dr. Steven Lomazow’s American Periodicals: A Collector’s Manual and Reference Guide through a post on Marty Weil’s blog — hoping that’s the next great resource for me.

B Sports Collectors Digest Standard Catalog of Sports Memorabilia — Love the detailed sections on sports magazines.

C A little spiral bound self-published guide titled Dixie Premiums Checklist by Tom Popelka which I purchased from the author himself on eBay. Extremely niche subject but provides instant identification of any Dixie Premium I handle, which is important to me.

#10 Did you ever get an item so cheaply that you felt like a thief? Ever stumble into such a great find that your fingers shook when you picked it up?

Oh, this is kind of commonplace for me, I’m looking for the big mark-up, and yes, I can get a little shaky or light-headed when I really score. I don’t have the pics, but I’ll tell a similar story from the old days. I was doing one of the bigger card shows in the area and these guys from St. Louis were also doing the show. They were very interested in a 1965 Topps Steve Carlton rookie card I had for sale (Carlton began with the Cardinals). After being asked about the possibility of a trade I went over to their table and they had the oddball type stuff I liked. This was the early 90s, so I was deliriously happy to deal the card, which I’d graded in the EX to EX+ range for a boxful of 60-70 St. Louis Cardinals programs from the 1940s and 50s. I was so happy I left a friend at the table and took a walk to calm myself down.

I came back and my friend tells me, “Those guys you traded with just came over and called you a crook!” What! “They said the card was trimmed.” So I went over, they showed me the measurements, I apologized profusely, and insisted we reverse the trade. I just handled too many cards to measure them all and had never really been exposed to any fraud such as that. So I took back my Carlton rookie card, which I just thought scored myself the motherlode of vintage baseball programs, and wound up cutting it’s price to a tenth of what it had been marked. Elation to frustration all in a few minutes.

#11 We all love our collections, but how much… If you were stranded on a deserted island, would you selfishly want your items with you, or would you prefer they were safely protected back at home?

Give me movies and I’ll be happy. Lock down my stock and protect my eBay feedback!

#12 What is the most ‘over the top’ item in your collection? Something you paid the most for, is the most mocked by others, an item you went to great lengths to get, was once greatly desired by you but now seems silly, or, somehow, is otherwise outrageous or has an outrageous story behind it…

I try not to make buying mistakes, so let me think… Okay, let me preface this by saying autographs scare me to death. I don’t trust them unless I get them in person. In fact I can barely understand the desire to acquire them when not acquired in person — well, I do get it, part of the collecting bug, but with the inherit danger of fraud and the lack of personal contact I just never really got why autograph collecting was so big. Anyway, I mentioned I collect items of the actor Warren William, right? I don’t know if I should really circulate this info, but what the heck — there’s a price I’ll pay for Warren William autographs, and he died in 1948, so they’re not terribly common, and I pay up to my price just assuming I’m buying a fake.

A Real Warren William Autograph?

I can never be disappointed that way, right? Even I think that’s kind of silly. Maybe someone can tell me if this one is a fake or not

#13 What ‘holy grail’ are you currently seeking for your collection?

I hate to dodge this, but really, from my perspective my holy grail is just the next cool item I need to have — I don’t know what it is yet. It might be an item for myself, more likely it’ll be an item for resale that I haven’t seen before and want to research. It goes back to your question when I talked about taking a deep interest in your collection. My passion is identifying and researching items that I don’t know about and can’t find any info about. So to answer this one, I’d say “the unknown.”

“The unknown,” that has to be my favorite answer of all time. Amen, Cliff, amen.

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Today, looking for something interesting to read, I flipped through a random volume of my Harmsworth’s Self-Educator, and ran across their section on the United States.   The Harmsworth was written in the early 1900s in the U.K., so it could be interesting in its outside viewpoint.  The section started out with a map — which surprised me right from the start.  It shows three cities in my home state, North Dakota:  Pembina, Bismarck, and Dakota City.   Pembina, at the time, was more-or-less the point of entry at the Canada border; Bismarck, of course, was the capital, but Dakota City?  Its position on the map puts it right in my neck of the woods, but I’d never heard of it before.

After a little research, I found out the story of Dakota City: as the Dakota territory opened up to settlement, people started grabbing their claims, setting up homesteads, establishing cities.  Owning the original townsite means you had some valuable property, so lots of ‘placeholder’ townsites were claimed at important spots.  At the confluence of the Sheyenne and Red Rivers, a dozen people took their shot at 4 or 5 different townsites, and Dakota City was one of the longest-lived.  Sure, it consisted of one log cabin, a French fur trader, and his wife and twelve kids, but it was a claim.  Sadly, river transportation didn’t prove to be as important as they thought — the railroad crossed the Red River ten miles to the south, making the ground underneath Dakota City worth nothing more than farmland.  By a stroke of luck, somebody in the U.K. had a map in hand that projected Dakota City’s influence on the Minnesota border, a landmark that eventually made it to print and back into the States in the 1910s.

If you are a collector of regional history, digging up these little “lost cities” may be a nice way to reinvigorate your collecting habits.   There are numerous reasons for a town to have fallen off the face of the earth, from political to ecological.   The land speculation behind Dakota City is just one of the ways a town can spring up suddenly and die away.   Railroads are another: in the days of steam, provisions were needed every dozen or so miles, and these ‘whistle-stops’ sometimes bred towns, and in others faded away without leaving their mark.   Simply being a ghost-town isn’t the only way to become a lost city:  growth and absorption of larger cities can make a town evaporate, even though the buildings still stand.  In other cases, a town may have started as one name, but government or physical changes means the town’s name changed significantly.   Changes in geography may have removed a town from the map, both naturally and through man’s intervention: many towns now sit at the bottom of lakes all across the U.S.

Maps, like the one above, are some of the easiest way to own some evidence of a lost city; those lost cities are some of the best ways to identify the date of a map, if unknown.   Fargo’s neighbor to the West, know known as “West Fargo”, went through several incarnations which give a pretty accurate date of a map depending on what’s shown.  If a town survived long enough to have a post office, postmarks and postcards are a possible collectible.   Towns even a little bigger may have offered souvenirs, such as milk glasses with their town name on them.   Ephemera is always a good way to discover or document lost towns: train tickets to now-nonexistent destinations, matchbooks from long-gone restaurants, receipts from general stores that haven’t been around for decades.

If you’re close enough, heading down the road and seeing what remains might be the first step: if a nearby community had some foresight, there may be a park, or historical marker identifying the former townsite, but you might need to check with your county recorder or surveyor’s office to get the right spot.   Google Maps and Mapquest might be helpful, although they can me quite innacurate even with current cities.   Sometimes, they might give you something to work on:  In both Google Maps and Mapquest, there’s a marker for Magnolia, North Dakota…and I’ve been through the area several times, and I know there’s no town there.   It is things like these, random remnants of a former town appearing without warning, that makes the research and collecting of lost regional towns so enjoyable to me.

Vintage Fold-Out Linen Postcards

Included in a recent lot buy, a vintage set of linen fold-out postcards by Curt Teich & Co., Inc., nine cards long, printed on both sides. They’re not dated, but I’m guessing they are from the 1930s or so (though Curt Teich did make linen cards through the 50s).

These fold-out postcards were apparently in some sort of envelope — a more traditional paper envelope, not the colorful folders you see with those Hollywood folio types. A bit of it is still attached to the top.

What’s so fascinating about these postcards is that they are not scenic souvenir images; these vintage postcards feature a selection of equally vintage jokes.

The humor includes the corn-ball jokes you’d expect, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants, “sorry I haven’t written” sentiments, & fisherman jokes. They hold up about as well now as they did then (I’m sure everyone has always smirked and rolled their eyes more than laughed at these jokes).

Many of the postcards contained risqué humor — some at the lady’s expense…

Same Old Moon Vintage Postcard

Others at the gentleman’s expense.

Vintage Risqué Postcard

Other cards were truly the products of their time, with Black Americana images we’d call racist today.

Black Americana Postcard With Girl On Potty

Scenic images on fold-out postcard would seem to make more sense than these humor ones… Because the cards are printed on both sides, there’s no place to send a note with the, “weather is wonderful, wish you were here — but you’re not Ha Ha Ha!” message — so purchasing a set as a memento of your trip a set of cards with scenes you’ve seen would make sense. But apparently someone did send these off to someone back home — or at least I’m assuming that because the envelope is torn off and missing. And there’s a note penciled on this one about painful sunburns:

Penciled Note About Sunburn On Vintage Postcard

I’m not sure the original recipient found these postcards very enlightening as far as their friend’s vacation went, but I find them to be a fascinating little time capsule.

Paper plays such an important role in the world of collecting. All types of paper objects are collected and for many different reasons. For example, a bank collector knows that his 1910 cast iron mechanical bank if in the original box, would double its price. Others search for a stack of trading stamps from an obscure retailer circa 1960. Books, magazines, posters, signs, paper labels, greeting cards, photographs, postcards, receipts, letters, advertising calenders, restaurant menus, playbills, maps, bus passes, sports and theater programs, blue prints, bar coasters, sheet music and newspapers are some of the types of collectible paper material I have dealt with in the antique business. If you check back through older posting here at Collectors’ Quest, you’ll see lots of references to ephemera and its importance to collectors, and you will find my own preference for old magazines.

We were promised a paperless world when the computer and Internet were introduced and while some paper items are going the way of the Edsel, others still remain. My local grocer has 187 magazine titles on display around the courtesy counter. Ninety-two have the same celebrity on the cover, the other 95 have 101 ways I can improve something about myself or my surroundings. So it looks safe for future collectors of that genre. Restaurant menus may be plastic coated paper, but that just means they will be cleaner when a collector displays them. Playbills are handed out at theaters and our local newspaper is still in paper form for now. Calendars look to be safe, books are plentiful, as are paper signs, posters and playing cards. Airline sickness bags are made of paper, (Yes, bunky, they are a collectible) and probably will be way into the future.

If I worry too much, it’s only because I’m concerned for the future ephemera collector. Will the printed newspapers die off completely? It’s already so thin I have to beg friends to save theirs so I have enough to wrap and ship collectibles to our buyers. Will electronic bill paying leave the future collector without a paper trail of receipts?

Today alone I received three emailed quotes on products I sell in my day job, that got sent out the same way they came in. Catalogs are showing up in electronic form, and take up no shelf space. Blue prints are no longer blue as CAD designing made the drafting table,T square and plastic templates obsolete. But who can argue with 3D designing. Record covers, if they can be referred to as such, are so small they make a very poor display. And what could you do, take 9 in a square to form a collage?

Today the lowly autograph of a long ago sports figure scrawled on the back of an envelope or bar napkin will fetch a very good price, but will that be true tomorrow when all these personalities “Sharpie” their names on clothing and unused sports gear, at “signings”, drawing in the masses.

When was the last time you wrote a letter, or for that matter can you remember sending a post card? With digital picture frames, how long before its to passe’ having the family portrait printed on paper and hung inside a wooden frame?

Now let me get back to the toy in its original box. I’ll only touch on this from my point of view. I suggest you need to see one of our other writers, Collin David, to really get into the subject of toy collecting. My prospective comes as a grandparent. Have you tried to get one of those new toy sets out of the box without a blow torch, wire cutters and sometimes a jackhammer? The parts are wired, taped and screwed onto the packaging. What future collector is going to find one of these toys in its original box? And if it’s a small toy it will be sealed in a plastic bag, or bubbled under cardboard that requires a straight razor to cut open.

So let’s all look twice before an old scrap of processed tree is put into the recycle bin and save a bit of yesterday’s history for future paper collectors.