A postcard or post card is a piece of thick paper or thin cardboard, typically rectangular, intended for writing and mailing without an envelope. Non-rectangular shapes may also be used but are rare. There are novelty exceptions, such as wooden postcards, copper postcards sold in the Copper Country of the U.S. state of Michigan, and coconut "postcards" from tropical islands.
A Christmas card is a greeting card sent as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to Christmastide and the holiday season. Christmas cards are usually exchanged during the weeks preceding Christmas Day by many people in Western society and in Asia. The traditional greeting reads "wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year". There are innumerable variations on this greeting, many cards expressing more religious sentiment, or containing a poem, prayer, Christmas song lyrics or Biblical verse; others focus on the general holiday season with an all-inclusive "Season's greetings". The first modern Christmas card was by John Calcott Horsley.
Lenticular printing is a technology in which lenticular lenses are used to produce printed images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as they are viewed from different angles.
Erotic photography is a style of art photography of an erotic, sexually suggestive or sexually provocative nature.
Photochrom, Fotochrom,Photochrome or the Aäc process is a process for producing colorized images from a single black-and-white photographic negative via the direct photographic transfer of the negative onto lithographic printing plates. The process is a photographic variant of chromolithography. Because no color information was preserved in the photographic process, the photographer would make detailed notes on the colors within the scene and use the notes to hand paint the negative before transferring the image through colored gels onto the printing plates.
Henry William Taunt (1842–1922) was a professional photographer, author, publisher and entertainer based in Oxford, England.
Edward Burgess Hudson (1854–1936) was the founder of Country Life magazine in 1897.
A real photo postcard (RPPC) is a continuous-tone photographic image printed on postcard stock. The term recognizes a distinction between the real photo process and the lithographic or offset printing processes employed in the manufacture of most postcard images.
James Valentine was a Scottish photographer. Valentine's of Dundee produced Scottish topographical views from the 1860s, and later became internationally famous as the producers of picture postcards.
George Godolphin Osborne, 10th Duke of Leeds, JP, styled Earl of Danby from birth until 1872 and subsequently Marquess of Carmarthen until 1895, was a British peer and Conservative politician.
Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business started by Raphael Tuck and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London in October 1866, selling pictures and greeting cards, and eventually selling postcards, which was their most successful line. Their business was one of the best known in the "postcard boom" of the late 1890s and early 1900s. During the Blitz, the company headquarters, Raphael House, was destroyed, including the originals for most of their series. The company never fully recovered.
Frederick Christian Palmer, known professionally as Fred C. Palmer, was the main public photographer of Herne Bay, Kent in the early years of the 20th century, working from Tower Studio. He photographed all the civic events in Herne Bay before 1914, and made portraits of the eccentric Edmund Reid, the erstwhile head of Metropolitan Police Service CID who had investigated the Whitechapel murders and then retired to Hampton-on-Sea, Herne Bay. In 1913 Marcel Duchamp used Palmer's 1910 photograph of the illuminated Grand Pier Pavilion as found object art in his Note 78, part of his Green Box artwork. In the 1920s and early 30s, Palmer took over William Hooper's Cromwell Street studio in Swindon, again producing local postcards, photographing prominent people and doing freelance work for local newspapers and the Council.
Judges Postcards is a picture postcard manufacturer based in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, first produced by Fred Judge in 1903. It was known as Judges Limited between 1910 and 1984.
Émile Eugène Louis Hamonic (1861–1943) was a French photographer and publisher, associated with the picture-postcard boom of the early 20th century. He established himself as a publisher of picture postcards in Saint-Brieuc in 1893, becoming one of the first great editors of this genre.
Martin John Ridley was an English Victorian/Edwardian photographer based in Bournemouth. Many of his photographs were used to produce picture postcards of the seaside towns and attractions in the South of England. Many of these postcards are still circulating at postcard fairs and acquired by collectors. They are usually identifiable by the initials "MJR" followed by a serial number. Several thousand of his original glass-plate negatives still exist and are being academically catalogued. A large sub-section of these negatives, featuring scenes in Wales, is held by the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
Thomas Crane (1843–1903) was an English illustrator and art director at Marcus Ward & Co. known for his colourful children's books and decorative greeting cards which often incorporated floral motifs.
A. & G. Taylor was a British photographic business, and manufacturer of cabinet cards and cartes de visite, and later picture postcards.
W.S. Cowell Ltd was a British printing company that produced a variety of books, including popular children's literature of the 1930s and prestigious coffee table books. Established in 1818, the company played a significant role in the history of printing in Ipswich. The company developed the Plastocowell printing process. However after a number of mergers in the late twentieth century, the name was finally dropped by its corporate owners in 1988.
Newman Post Card Co. (1904–1918) was founded by Oscar Newman. The Newman Post Card Company published post cards in hand colored collotype and tinted halftones, which were mostly holiday cards and views of Southern California.
The history of postcards is part of the cultural history of the United States. Especially after 1900, "the postcard was wildly successful both as correspondence and collectible" and thus postcards are valuable sources for cultural historians as both a form of epistolary literature and for the bank of cultural imagery included in the postcard illustrations reflecting historic popular culture norms and tropes. Postcards are also valuable resources for scholars of architectural and regional history.
