Anneli was kind enough to send this reproduction of a turn of the (20th) century divided-back card from Finland; it is the first card of this type I’ve seen that’s not in the English language.

She translates the poem as: “I would love to make a band of beautiful flowers for you, my friend, friend whose picture is in my heart.”

It’s a good thing Anita was on vacation here at lovely Swartswood Lake, New Jersey; she clearly needed one. I have two copies of this postcard, both sent by Anita; both were sent to her cousin, Miss Rose La Rocca of Brooklyn, New York; both were sent at the same time on the same day. Rose must have been scratching her head when these two card fell through the slot in her door.

Postcard the first: “To Rose, Having a wonderful time. It’s real lovely out here. I miss you all. Give regards to all home. I’ll be seeing you soon. Your cousin, Anita.”

Postcard the second: “Hello Rose, Having a wonderful time. How are your brothers, aunt, uncle, Grandma and you. I’ll be seeing you soon. Love, your cousin, Anita.”

Sure, she sounds nice, but Anita is obviously off her nut. I have a few theories:

Theory 1: Anita is being overworked back in Brooklyn, and ran out to the Garden State for some desperately-needed R&R. She wrote a dozen postcards home and just didn’t realize that she wrote to Rose twice.

Theory 2: This “Lake House” is a sanitarium, and the phrase “I’ll be seeing you soon” carries with it an implied threat of the Michael Myers variety. Note that she enumerates the entire houseful of relatives against whom she has a grudge.

Theory 3: In reality, Anita sent only one postcard. The second card is from one of those alternate universes, like in the last Star Trek movie.

I will be happy to entertain any other theories; please leave a comment. And once you’ve helped me figure out what went on here, be sure to check out the other blogs celebrating Postcard Friendship Friday today. Speaking of vacations — TGIF!

Since there’s no worded suggestion, one must assume that it’s the illustration that is meant to impart some guidance. What I’m getting out of it is that you should take your lover to a quiet spot in the moonlight, stick out your tongue, and see what happens.

This card didn’t go through the postal system and appears to have been hand-delivered to Great-Grandpa Phil, presumably by some young lass who was making her intentions clear. Looks like Phil had a happy Valentine’s Day; I hope you do the same.

This is a postcard sent to my Great-Grandpa Phil by his cousin, James, on February 25 of either 1908 or 1909; the postmark isn’t clear. (Also, somebody did a poor job of filching the stamp.) What’s odd is that it’s postmarked at Helen, Pennsylvania. James lived in Dawson, Pennsylvania, about 10 miles from Phil, but he mailed it from Helen, which was only about two miles away. James and Phil were both pre-teens at the time; James and family might have been visiting friends. I don’t recall any that any relatives lived in the very tiny hamlet of Helen.

James writes: “Dear Philip: I rec’d your card. Glad to hear from you. Mamma (Phil’s Aunt Kate) will answer your card you sent her soon. Good-by, James.”

Over at Girls Go Postal! today, I posted another of Phil’s cards, a postcard sent to him by my great-great-great-grandmother. Check it out, then take a look at the other folks celebrating Postcard Friendship Friday today!

This is a leather postcard, one of four that I picked up while vacationing in New England.  All four are addressed to Miss Grace Hoare of Lowell, Massachusetts, who received them around 1907.  My notes don’t say what I paid for them — they might have cost next to nothing, or I might have been persuaded to part with a few dollars each for them, just for the novelty’s sake.

Some vintage humor for Postcard Friendship Friday: a deacon goes to town and discovers that they make postcards of pretty girls! (You can click on the extreme closeup at right and see for yourself what makes this deacon smile.)

Moreover, he seems pleased as punch at the discovery. And why shouldn’t he be? I know that I was pretty excited when I found out about it.

Looks like my Great-Grandpa Phil received this postcard, oh, a little over a hundred years ago; the postmark is a little obscured, but it looks like January 9, 1909.

“American Soldiers marching down the Rue Royal, July 14th, 1918, in the parade celebrating the Independence Day of France. In the background is seen La Madeleine, formerly the temple of glory which Napoleon I built in honor of the ‘Grande Armée’.”  From a painting by Josephe-Félix Bouchor, official painter to the French armies, who both saw and painted World War I.

This card was a gift from Eddy at D’hier à aujourd’hui (From Yesterday to Today), who presents antique picture postcards of Paris along with modern images of the same scenes.

A clarification: Bastille Day (or, as the French call it, the 14th of July), is not exactly “the Independence Day of France”; it simply marks the start of the French Revolution, in 1789.  Granted, there are military parades during the day and fireworks at night, but nobody in France is having people over for a cookout or drinking a toast to the Revolution.  More’s the pity.

Given the amount of effort that the artist put into the the building and the trees, you’d think that the clouds would be a little more detailed.  This is a leather postcard, one of four that I picked up in a shop while vacationing in New England.  All were sent to Miss Grace Hoare of Lowell, MA.  While the postmark on this card shows no year, it was probably manufactured and mailed in 1907 — an opinion I base on the other cards like this.

Yesterday over on Postcrossing I sent my hundredth “official” card (in this case, it was an envelope filled with five or six cards; my way of helping a young Dutch girl reach her goal of collecting cards representing all 50 U.S. States) was reported as having been received.  The first hundred cards traveled a combined 437,139 miles.

Since I’ve hit the century mark, let me go back to the man who started my collection for me: my great-grandfather, Philip Nelson Smith.  This “Phillip” postcard (spelled differently on the card than he spelled it) was part of his collection.  It’s unused and is almost certainly 100 years old, and might have been manufactured as early as 1907, based on the format of the postcard back.

You can’t see it on the scan, but the stuff surrounding each letter, while mostly dark in color, is speckled with silver glitter!  A great deal of it still remains on the card; I try to handle this card as little as possible.  The flowers and four-leaf clovers are embossed into the card.  The card was probably made in Germany (most cards from this time frame were); the pre-printed address lines on the back are aligned similarly to most European cards, and the word “postcard” appears on the back in a dozen different languages.

Camp O-AT-KA is a summer camp for boys that exists still today.  It was founded in 1906 and has been on the same site in Sebago, Maine since 1907 .  This postcard might date from as early as 1910, based on the sturdiness of the card stock that was used (and the card is still like new), but I suspect that it’s probably from the early 1920s.

The camp was founded by the Reverend Ernest Joseph Dennen, an Episcopal minister from Lynn, Massachusetts.  He had developed a program which he called “The Order of Sir Galahad”, designed to teach the boys of his parish the virtues of “helpfulness, obedience, truth, chivalry, and service.”  The camp, in turn, was a reward for the boys who had worked hard to live up to these virtues.

Today, those virtues are apparently only for rich white boys.  Your boy can enroll in the camp’s two-week “starter program” for the low, low price of only $2,850.  If I were you, I’d go for the seven-week program: a real bargain at $7,700. Sure, running a big camp is expensive but, even adjusted for inflation, I went to camps of comparable size as a boy for about a tenth of the cost — and some of the values I learned were priceless.

This early postcard, probably around 1910-1915, features the Aare River gorge (Aareschlucht) near Meiringen, Switzerland.  Satellite imagery from the area is quite stunning, and the view from the ground today is equally as beautiful as it was a hundred years ago.

The first path to and through the gorge was built in 1888 and, naturally, admission was charged.  Interestingly, it was not Meiringen that received the original concession from the government; instead, it was the village of Villigen, which was over 120 kilometers away.  By 1912, electric lighting had been added, allowing the gorge to remain open to the public after dark, and the first restaurant was built and opened in 1928.  A flood in 1942 destroyed most of the paths, but these were rebuilt and additional roads to the gorge were added by 1947, resulting in a large increase in visitors.

From 1912-1957, a tram ran between the gorge and the towns of Meiringen and Reichenbach, home to Reichenbach Falls, also on the Aare River and the place where Sherlock Holmes met his death in A. Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Final Problem”.

Shall we play a game, my friends?  Ju-Chin tells me that this is/was a traditional game in Taiwan; I have seen other representations of this game, with various motifs. This particular motif features characters from a cartoon known in the US as Battle of the Planets, or sometimes G-force and has been on the air in various incarnations and overdubs here since 1978, with a movie planned for 2010.  Its first incarnation was produced in Japan in 1972 as Science Ninja Team Gatchaman; it became popular in Taiwan in 1977 as Scientific Flying Fantasy Warriors (Ke Xuei Xiao Fei Xia).

The original game board is obviously much larger than postcard-size; Ju-Chin writes that each of the grids has a ”different prizes such as candy (or) chewing gum”.

Isn’t the back of the card just as cool as the front? Not only is the Gatchaman artwork reproduced, but there’s also a very unique stampbox as well (which Ju-Chin was kind enough to leave uncovered for me).

Be sure to check out the other blogs celebrating Postcard Friendship Friday.

Those old Easter postcards with anthropomorphic chicks and rabbits give me nightmares.  Instead, I bring you this lovely Spring scene, courtesy of Great-Grandpa Phil.  Happy Easter!

This week’s foray into Postcard Friendship Friday brings us to this gift from my postcard friend Eddy, who runs the excellent blog D’hier à aujourd’hui (From Yesterday to Today), which compares postcard images of the France of yesteryear with modern views of the same sites. This card, along with another turn-of-the-century French card, arrived a few days ago, but you get to see only this one today; I will save the other for Bastille Day.

This postcard, postmarked 24 August 1905, shows the top of the Fontaine Carpeaux in Paris’s 6th District.  The four maidens, created by sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, represent the “four parts of the world”: an African; an American Indian; an Asian; and a Caucasian.  They are posed as if they are turning the celestial sphere, complete with the signs of the zodiac, around the Earth.  Interestingly, the sphere was not created by Carpeaux, but by another sculptor, Pierre Legrain.  The fountain’s pool, not pictured, contains sculptures of horses emerging from the water, which were created by yet another sculptor, Emmanuel Frémiet.  But it is only Carpeaux’s name on the fountain.

The back of this card is even more fascinating:

The card is addressed to Monsieur et Madame Poulain (ancestors of Amelie, perhaps?) at 6 Rue de la Présentation in Paris, which is looking a little worse for wear today.  The message is in an antique hand, and seems to be misspelled and ungrammatical here and there in a language that I don’t speak well, but I believe that it reads something like the following (please feel free to correct me):

All my regrets at not being here yesterday to thank you for your strong support. I charge this card with the deed and will meet both of you for dinner tomorrow night Friday without fail.  I embrace you (both). Yvette.

I guess the modern equivalent is receiving an email that closes with the word “hugs.”  There’s also a postscript in the upper left: “Alice wants(?) me to hug you for her.”  Let us hope that Yvette kept her appointment, gave hugs all around, and didn’t have to send another apology.

Every time I mention to someone how few cards from Alaska I have, more appear in my mailbox.  This postcard (along with another Alaska card, as well as a New Jersey card) comes to me from Donna, an Alaska native whom I met on Postcrossing.  She was happy to volunteer them.  “I have way too many cards,” writes Donna, “and I am trying to downsize.”  Isn’t that what descendants are for?  It’s all I can do to keep the grandkids from raiding my collection; they can wait for it, just as I did.

A tomcod, which I had never heard of, resembles a cod and is related to the cod, but isn’t a cod.  There’s an Atlantic species and a Pacific species, and the name supposedly comes from an American Indian language, from a word meaning “plenty fish.”  Well, they do look plentiful.  I love the posture of the guy in the background.  You can just tell he hasn’t gotten a nibble all day.

This card was published by Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco, probably around 1910-1915.

Ramona was an 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson which described the travails endured by our young half-Scottish half-Native American heroine, mostly due to racial discrimination. It was immensely popular, and many places in San Diego jumped on the popularity bandwagon, claiming to be the places portrayed in the novel. The Camulos Ranch, pictured above, had a valid claim; the author is known to have visited there during her research, and describes particular furnishings and other items at Camulos in great detail, despite having stayed there only a few hours.

This card is one among a group of six cards purchased at Ramona’s Marriage Place, another attraction, that I found in a shop as part of a lot of several California cards. Each of them has a “From Ramona’s Marriage Place” rubber stamp on the back, and were probably purchased at the same time by the same tourist.

None of the cards appears to be any newer than around 1915 at the very latest. This particular card was published by Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco.

Happy 2009! Except for the detail inside the rectangular illustration, everything on this card has been embossed. According to my (incomplete) notes, I picked this card up in a shop somewhere for a buck. The card was published circa 1910, but let’s imagine that it was published in time for New Year’s Day 1909 so that we can say it’s seen exactly one hundred New Year’s Days.

This card ostensibly depicts the very first stagecoach in California but, given that it was located at a well-known tourist trap, I am hard-pressed to believe it.

This card is one among a group of six Ramona-based cards that I found in a shop as part of a lot of several California cards. Each of them has a “From Ramona’s Marriage Place” rubber stamp on the back, and were probably purchased at the location itself, at the same time by the same tourist.

None of the cards appears to be any newer than around 1915 at the very latest. This particular card was published by Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco.

This embossed card of German manufacture was sent to Great-Grandpa Phil from one “Lila”; it was postmarked at Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania on December 24, 1910 at 5 PM. As fast as the postmen used to be back then, I’m pretty sure that Phil didn’t receive this until the morning of December 26. In case you’re wondering, Lila is not my great-grandmother.

To my readers and fellow collectors: have a very merry Christmas!

This card bears a copyright notice of 1914 on the front, but wasn’t postally used until June 7, 1950, when Lloyd Stoltz mailed it to Kay Anthony. Note his initials rubber stamped in the upper left corner (below). Published by Johnson’s Post Card Works of Waupun, Wisconsin.

If you think this is cute, wait until tomorrow, when you can see the card that Lloyd sent to Kay the day before.