For Amy Nicolai, postcard collecting began with a search for something that was difficult to find anywhere else: the early history of music in Minnesota. With relatively few books documenting the years before rock and roll, Amy began exploring unconventional historical sources, including newspaper archives, antique sheet music, advertising and eventually postcards. She discovered that…
Dr. Paul Ostlie has never been interested in history simply as a collection of names, dates, and events. For him, history is something tangible. It can be held in your hands, studied from every angle, and discovered in the most unexpected places. Ostlie describes himself as a historian, although his education did not follow a…
By John Graf and Perry Casalino Chicago’s Luxury Apartment Buildings presents a history of the city’s residential buildings constructed during the Gilded Age of the 19th century. These buildings redefined the city’s architectural landscape and transformed urban living. Beginning with the first structure, erected in 1876, and continuing through the close of the 19th century,…
Long before cats ruled the internet, they ruled the postcard rack. One artist is largely responsible for that: Louis Wain, the English illustrator whose wide eyed, upright, endlessly expressive cats became one of the most collected postcard subjects of the early 1900s. Wain started drawing cats in the 1880s, when the idea of a cat…
Dr. Schmidt’s promotional postcards traveled further than he ever expected — small pieces of paper that crossed the Atlantic ocean three times. These two examples left Chicago at the turn of the last century as photographic negatives and then returned as German printed postcards. They still carry every postmark from the next journey Dr. Schmidt…
Alan Sager collects postcards — small-town scenes, mostly, and the closer they are to his hometown of Quincy, Illinois, the more he’s willing to pay for them. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time, Alan admits, when he thought postcard collecting was “stupid” — he couldn’t understand why anyone would bother. That changed…