Postcards Galore! Part III

Moving on to RPPC and Large Letter Postcards.

Real Photo Postcards (RPPC)

RPPCs are actual photographs printed on photographic paper with a postcard back.  They date from the late 1880s.  In the early 1900s they were popular for sending family photos and many old photos in albums are actually postcards.  They were also used for advertising.  Later, city street photographers would snap candid photos of passerby.  For 50¢ they would later mail you a photo or postcard.  I shared one such RPPC of my grandfather here.  Often captions were scratched into the negative, which showed up white on the finished product. 

This is a Real Photo Postcard.  

So is this...

1914

and this...

The postcard above, which had a white border not shown, is very special to me.  It depicts "Witches Falls" in Nevada County, California.  I may live in Oregon now, but my family goes way back in California, particularly on my father's side.  He spend time in Nevada County as a child, and he had this postcard.

Many years later I went to a camp up there, and one of the places we hiked to, and swam at, was this falls, then called "Fanny Falls," as we would slide down those smooth rocks on our fannies!  The name was changed again, it's now "Gypsy Falls."  

This is a photo taken round about 1968.  The girl closest to the camera, with her back turned, was one of my best friends.

 Dating RPPCs is fairly easy... if there is no stamp.  The stampbox bears the mark of the brand of paper used.   My European RPPCs do not show these marks.

On the top row are two AZO.  AZO was from Eastman Kodak, and common between 1907 and 1918.  Notice the placement of the corner triangles.  These further date the postcard.  Four arrows up = 1914-1918.  Two arrows up, two arrows down = 1918-1930.  If the photo of the children above wasn't already dated on the back to 1914, I'd know by the paper brand arrows. 

EKC paper, upper right, was used between 1939 and 1950.  This style from PMC, lower left, was 1920-1935, which fits the time period of my grandfather's photo.  

Kodak began putting the Kodak name in 1950, and it's still the paper most used today for RPPCs.  The lower middle is a Mexican postcard, and reads Kodak Stamp Paper. 

Older RPPCs may show silvering, a sign of aging, as they are actual photographs. 

Another type of postcard that was very popular in the '30s, '40s, and '50s was the Large-Letter Postcard.  These featured large, 3-D block letters of the names of tourist spots.  In the background were illustrations of landmarks, and many also bore messages such as "Greetings from..."  Some collectors specialized in Large-Letter Postcards, of which there are plenty, as just one publisher alone produced them from all the U.S. states and more than 1,000 cities.   The first were printed on high rag content similar to those of the Linen Period, but later the very vivid, flashy slick look became popular.   The backs have a legend of what is illustrated within each letter.

1946

Incredible as it sounds, I got this next Large-Letter Postcard for 5¢ at St. Vincent de Paul!  It was just mixed in with all the other loose postcards, which are always 5¢.   This one is from Curt Teich, Co  of Chicago, one of the prominent Large-Letter publishers in the 1930s - 1950s.

1940

Part IV will be postcard edges, HTL postcards, and collecting postcards.