The thrill of collecting postcards is discovering something among 200,000 to 300,000 examples, holding it, caressing it and knowing you need it, said Leonard A. Lauder, chairman emeritus of TheEstee Lauder Cos.Inc., who has just given a large collection to the Lake County Discovery Museum.
“I love that works of art are printed so that anyone can buy them,” Lauder said. “The variety of what they put on little postcards astounds me.”
Lauder’s 35,500-card collection gives the Curt Teich Postcard Archive at the museum, part of the Lake County Forest Preserves, a significant boost on the 30th anniversary of its founding. His gift, valued at $260,000, also provides money for cataloging, preserving and digitizing the cards.
Once completed, researchers will have access to the collection. They now use the archive for restoring historic buildings and landscaping, for genealogy and for illustrations in textbooks and ads.
Some of the postcards likely will be exhibited in the forest preserves’ new building in Libertyville after the move from farm structures in the Lakewood Forest Preserve in Wauconda is completed in about two years.
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The archive began with a decision by the son of Curt Teich to save the “visual record of the 20th century” that his father’s Chicago postcard company had amassed, said Katherine Hamilton-Smith, district director of cultural resources. The company was closing, and files were being hauled off.
“It was an important call,” Hamilton-Smith said. “It could come into public hands and be something, or go in a landfill and be worm food.”
The archive now contains other collections, including thousands of images of cities and towns, Route 66, the Lincoln Highway and other travel sites. It totals close to 400,000 postcards, which had their heyday between 1900 and 1918. They may have cost only a penny to buy and a penny to mail, but they were an important means of connecting people before there were telephones, and postcard publishers went to great lengths to create small artistic images.
Lauder started collecting the work of Raphael Tuck & Sons, a British company that quickly capitalized on that government’s approval in 1899 of printing postal cards sized 5.5 inches by 3.5 inches. Tuck, who had published greeting cards, hired illustrators for a set of London view vignettes and sent the pictures for printing to Germany, which had what were considered the world’s highest-quality printers.
The next year, his company entered the U.S. market, his son set in motion a postcard-collecting competition as a marketing gimmick and the craze began. Die-hard collectors used to keep track of their postcards on sheets of lined paper and toted the records to shows to avoid duplicate purchases, said Susan Brown Nicholson, of Lisle, a dealer and author of four books on postcards. EBay and other online sites have changed the methods and spurred extensive databases of cards, proving or disproving their rarity and affecting value, she said.
Lauder wants nothing to do with online buying, in part because one can’t see or feel the condition of cards. “I only collect pristine examples,” he said.
Deltiology is the official name of postcard collecting and means, in Greek, the study of small images, Nicholson said. The vast array of subjects and artistic techniques, coupled with the desire to acquire complete sets of certain images, drives collectors, she said.
Most of Lauder’s donated cards are “Oilettes,” a Tuck process to emulate oil paintings that started with the commissioning of a work of art. Two cards show their range: “The Time of the Plum Blossoms” delicately depicts two kimono-clad women near a pagoda and using a parasol to shade themselves under a profusion of cotton-candy pink blossoms, while “Point Duty” is a street scene at dusk in Piccadilly Circus with men and women dressed to the nines aboard a horse-drawn carriage and a double-decker bus.
Postcards advertised everything from Cadbury’sCocoa to art deco hotels in Miami Beach and served as propaganda during Prohibition and the women’s suffrage era. Now ubiquitous as a way of saying hello from far-flung locales, postcards once were much more timely missives, sometimes being delivered in American cities as many as three times a day.
“The message, ‘I’ll be down for tea at 2,’ was mailed in the morning and delivered around noon, giving the recipient time to get ready,” Nicholson said. Despite the quaintness of some writing, collectors prize images.
“Illustrated cards were art for the masses,” she said. “Collectors get the emotional reward of having the cards.”
Lauder said his motivation is different.
“For most, it’s the pleasure of possession. To me, it’s the pleasure of preservation. I collected all along knowing they’d someday go to a museum,” Lauder said.
He chose the Lake County Discovery Museum because of its size and the Curt Teich Archive.
“I’d rather be a big fish in a specialized pond than a little, little fish in a more generalized big pond,” he said.