Tuesday Treasures - June 30, 2026

 Postcards Again! 

I'm not sure if I mentioned how agreeable the manager at St. Vincent de Paul was on the "big haul" postcard purchase days.  Maybe it's because she was retiring in June!  One day she brought out boxes of antique postcards for me to look through, and told the volunteer cashiers to give me 25% off all my postcards that day!  

Here's what I got (the dogs from the same day are under all the ephemera.)  There are the holy/prayer cards from a previous post.  The WWII ship photos will be featured on an upcoming Tuesday.  The only individual postcards shared today are two which come last, a case of "Last, but not least." 

I got a lot of postcard books. 

Amboise, France with tissue between each image. Amboise is on the Loire River.

Chicago to La Junta Overland Set No 1 depicts scenes along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, and were produced exclusively for them.

I got several postcard books of Pike's Peak from the 1920s-1940s, plus this little mailable packet of photos from 1945.

Lots and lots of souvenir folders.  While the images are not postcards, the entire folders are mailable, so I include them in my postcard collection.  

32 larger ones... 

... and 15 smaller! 

One of my favorites is this, The FABULOUS date story!  My mother loved dates, and actually had a double date story.  Not a double date, as in two couples, but a date that included dates!  She moved to San Francisco from a small town where she'd never had dates, the palm tree kind that is. On one of her first dates with her future husband (my father) he brought a picnic to the beach.  The picnic included Egyptian dates (his future brother-in-law was Egyptian).  She saved the seeds in a jewelry box, which I actually still have. I mean I have the date seeds, but I also have the jewelry box!  

Did you happen to notice the stamp box on some of these folders?  

These folders were considered third-class printed matter, not personal correspondence.   IF you didn't add any messages, even a "Wish you were here" and it became first-class mail.  Greeting cards could be sent the same way, IF you left the envelope unsealed!  With NO message, not even a "Love, Mom."  The USPS assumed any personal correspondence would be sealed.  I wonder if they peeked in every unsealed envelope to check?  I was very surprised to find that this didn't change until 1996, when third-class single-piece mail was eliminated. 

Another day I found these two antique  Halloween postcards for only 75¢ each.  Halloween is the hardest holiday to find, and these are actually my first. My others are replicas of antiques. Neither of these were used. 

© 1911 

c. 1916-1920