For Your New Year's Entertaining

Entertain 1960's-Style with this Party Perk percolator. It's perfect for the buffet or rumpus room! All we need is a fondue set to go with it...

Happy New Year from the Blog About the Postcards.

This Hits the Spot!

If the Chinese food from last week wasn't to your taste, how about Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner at the Spot Cafe, on Route 66 in San Bernadino, CA.

Chinese Food!

Let's have Chinese Food for dinner tonite, at the Chiam Restaurant in Chicago. Anyone have a time machine to take us back to the spot of this vintage linen card?

Shell Oil Tower

According to the architect George Robb's website (www.gra.ca) the Shell Oil Tower was the result of a 1954 architectural competition for an observation tower at the Canadian National Exhibition. The Tower appeared as a beacon in the night, surrounded by urban floodlights and activity. The Tower glimmered from within, emphasizing it openness, freedom of movement, and purpose as a conspicuously important place in the city.

The Tower was completed in 1955 and served as a landmark for its citizens. It was torn down in 1986. Yet it still holds a place in the history of Toronto as a significant and visionary example of civic architecture. Here's a photograph of the tower at some point in the '60's. Looks better in the illustration on the postcard, dont you think?

Doom Products

Very nice juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly in this postcard! The advertisement is for a pesticide that kills Japanese beetles from the Fairfax Biological Laboratory's line of Doom products.

The back states that the brew contains "microbial spores of Milky Disease," which have "proved fatal to Japanese beetles in the grub stage, without affecting beneficial insects, humans, animals, or plants." Sounds to me like the first fifteen minutes of any good sci-fi horror movie, just before the characters realize that the stuff they spread over the roses is killing humans too!

Happy New Year 5772!

Happy New Year to all my Jewish friends. I've included some new Shanah Tova greeting cards from my collection. These were published somewhere around 1900-1920 by the Williamsburg Art Company. Each has the Hebrew inscription "L'Shana Tova Tikatavu" which roughly translates into "May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year." The other wording on the postcards is in the Yiddish language, however I have translations for only a few of the over 100 different cards in my collection. Any Yiddish speakers out there want to translate?

Poetry and a Hurricane

Here in New England we are just wrapping up with Hurricane Irene, only to be walloped in Connecticut once again with inches and inches of rain over the past few days. A fitting card for this week is an excerpt from the poem, "The Lighthouse," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The card has a view of White Head, which I'm guessing is near the Whitehead lighthouse near Camden, Maine, commissioned in 1803 by the U.S. Congress.

The poem is about a dozen stanzas long, with the one above somewhere in the middle. It is very typical of Longfellow's poetry: lyrical, full of symbolism and romanticism, and having mass appeal to his fans in the mid-1800's. If you're not familiar with Longfellow, you're probably familiar with some of the lines he made famous, including "footprints on the sands of time," "By the shores of Gitchee-Gumee," and "Into each life some rain must fall." Well, I'd say we've had more than "some" this round!