‘Greetings from AmeriCollector’:
The art of linen postcards

I just went to eBay’s “Collectibles” category and clicked on “Postcards”: 1,788,849 results were noted, in categories ranging from “Advertising” and “Amusement Parks” to “U.S. States, Cities & Towns” and “International Cities & Towns” (along with “Supplies & Reference” – i.e., postcard sleeves, album pages, etc., for collectors – and “Other,” some 100,000 miscellaneous cards).

That’s a lot of postcards! And yet, almost all of the categories concern the subject matter of the images on the cards; only one, “Real Photo,” relates to the artwork, the production process or the texture of the cards.

This is interesting, because postcards have changed a lot over the past 125 years or so that they have been in regular use – since before most people had telephones, and in some places the mail was delivered twice a day. Most very early postcards that I’ve seen were plain-Jane functional – basically, index cards with printed postage on them, a design that the U.S. Postal Service was still selling up until fairly recently, if they aren’t still. As lithographic processes advanced, postcards got more artistic and more colorful and were generally printed on better card stock to hold the ink.

In the early 1930s – when art deco style was the look – “linen” postcards (printed on paper card stock with a linen-like appearance) went into large-scale production. They are easily recognizable, the “Greetings from [fill in the place]” kind (known as large-letter cards, which were actually depicted on a series of U.S. postage stamps) being the most famous examples: printed in striking pastels, with a matte cross-hatched textured finish that, if you hold the cards up to the light, actually looks like a linen weave.

Rare, striking and unusual linen cards are highly sought after by collectors, not simply for their graphics but because they absolutely scream post-Depression, World War II and postwar America. There are 1939–40 New York World’s Fair cards, “Keep ’Em Flying” wartime cards, direct-mail product adverting cards, Route 66 cards and diner cards and a gazillion other roadside cards from the early baby boom, when many American households bought their cars and started to hit the road to see the country they had defended against fascism.

To me, an avid although sporadic collector of linen cards, these are windows to an era, a time when people actually WROTE messages to one another, stuck stamps on and popped them in a mailbox. Some linen cards are just so cool, they are models for advertising artists even today – and just light-years ahead of e-cards in terms of design sense. (Again, if art deco is your thing, then linen postcards may be just the collecting area for you: Check out the many Miami Beach hotel cards and the ones featuring streamline diners and locomotives and Greyhound bus stations.)

The guy who “wrote the book” (the first real book, as far as I’m concerned) on linen cards – as well as a price list for the clueless – is Mark Werther, a Pennsylvania architect and orchid grower who collects a lot of different things (porcelain, flamingos, Mexican sombreros) who not only hits all the postcard shows he can but has also written many articles for Barr’s Postcard News (www.BarrsPCN.com), the Time magazine of postcard collecting. Mark’s volume, co-authored with Lorenzo Mott, is titled “Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream” (published in hardcover 2002 and available for $39.95 on Amazon.com) is both art book and reference work, as is his paperback “Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream Price Guide 2004” ($11.95 on Amazon); in fact, considering that many sellers of postcards on eBay don’t really know a linen card when they see one (and beware the difference between “linen” and “linen era” cards: Read on …), I think these are a must. (Note: Mark is working on a new price guide, hopefully available this summer.)

I first read about Mark in 2002, when “Linen Postcards” was just published, in an article about linen cards written by Bart Ripp, one of the best writers the Tacoma News Tribune has had in recent years. (They got me hooked on linen cards – as if I needed another hobby.) I have asked Mark his advice many times over the years and am much impressed not only with his experience but his artistic sensibilities (again, he’s an architect): You may not be lucky enough to find a Rembrandt etching at your local Goodwill thrift shop, but Mark may help you spot a great and possibly valuable linen card among a box of postcards the next time you go to a garage sale or flea market.

Recently I asked Mark for some basic information on linen postcards:

AmeriCollector: When were linen postcards produced?

Mark Werther: There were forms of linens produced in the United States as early as 1906 or 1907. What is considered a classical linen postcard was first issued in 1931 by Curteich of Chicago. Linen cards were produced until about 1959.

AC: What’s the difference between a linen card and a “linen era” postcard? How can you identify a linen card?

Mark: A linen card has a raised pattern of fine lines usually perpendicular to each other, similar to linen fabric. All the linen cards required intensive rendering work from craftsman. The number of lines, depth and pattern vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer. There were other cards produced during the 1931–59 linen era using matte paper with no raised line patterning. I believe that these matte cards are as valuable as the linens. Other types of cards, like chromes (shiny picture-type cards), also started during the linen era but are in totally different category

AC: Why did postcard makers stop making linens, and what were they replaced by?

Mark: Linens were produced for close to 30 years. That is a long run. When the chrome-type cards were perfected by the mid-1940s, they caught the interest of the public and were far less labor-intensive to produce than the linens, thus the start of the demise of linens. The popularity of the chromes, combined with the availability of inexpensive cameras in the mid-1950s, like Brownies and Anscomatics, allowed the masses to take their own color pictures of the sites, so the linens were less desirable.

AC: What is the price range for linens? Are they going up in price? What are the rarest cards?

Mark: Linens have steadily risen in price, but they can still be found in 25-cent boxes. Usually, individual linens are in the $2 to $6 range. As the artistic quality, scarcity, and interest in the subject increases, so do the prices of the cards. Better-quality cards in categories like diners, drive-ins, great restaurants and advertising are commonly priced from $10 to $75. Great advertising cards that are scarce can command prices up to hundreds of dollars.

AC: What are the hallmarks of a great linen card? What are the most popular categories?

Mark: Lorenzo Mott, my friend and co-author of the “Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream,” used the term “stunner.” A great linen card usually falls under the “stunner” category and is a card that is superior based on better graphics, color, contrast, sharpness, composition and display of subject. These cards stand out from the average cards. Luckily, the “stunners” can often be lesser-priced cards. The popularity of linens is in the eye of the beholder/collector.

AC: How important is condition in general? What condition issues make a card unacceptable for a collector?

Mark: I have always believed that unused, near mint to mint linens are the most valuable cards. (Note: “Mint” means no rounded corners, edge wear, creases, stray marks, stains or fading. – DC)

AC: How important is condition if a card is really rare?

Mark: I rarely purchase a less-than-near-perfect card, even if very rare. If it is extremely rare, I might make an exception, but not often.

AC: Should collectors avoid postally used cards?

Mark: There are collectors who like cancels and messages. It is a matter of setting one’s own standard. I have avoided the used cards, as they most often do not meet my requirement of near mint to mint condition. I do make an exception with those with special advertising, salutations and commemorative cancels and with important addresses and messages on the backs.

AC: What advice would you give a new collector? Where are the best places for collectors to find great cards?

Mark: I avoided postcards for nearly 30 years of collecting. There needs to be a catalyst that lights the collecting fire: a special subject, color, a time period, historical references. When I started, I relied on postcard dealers at paper and postcard shows. Unfortunately, they were not providing all of the answers. There was no one book on linens that covered the subject. My friend Lorenzo and I then decided, since we were doing the extra research, we might as well condense it into a book and published “Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream” in 2001. This was followed by the price guide in 2004. So this sounds like a self-advertisement, but the book is still the only all-encompassing reference guide. It is a short course in one location and gives the new collector a great advantage in appreciation and identification of linens. For further information, there are individual references to diners, “large letters” and hotels, and specialty books on cartoons and some locations.

AC: When will your new price guide due to be published? How many price entries and photos will be in the book?

Mark: I plan on about 40 pages with updates on prices on the 500 images in the book: 100 images in the 2004 price guide plus another 200 images and prices. Hopefully it will be out by mid-2011.

AC: Are you discovering anything new about linen cards?

Mark: I am discovering new linens all the time and am amazed at the wealth of historic information contained in the images and descriptions. Especially rewarding is to find “stunners” that represent the best of the linens.

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All images courtesy Mark Werther

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A blast from the repast
Diners still serve motorists good eats – with a side of nostalgia

Over the broad landscape of American popular culture, the automobile crosses all terrains, all social divides: From art and music to sport and lifestyle, among rich and poor, regardless of gender, race, creed or political persuasion, cars continue to elicit the same fanfare and excitement that greeted the first “horseless carriages” in city streets and cow towns across a U.S. on the threshold of the twentieth century.

But cars, and the people who ride in them, have needs, the most basic of which is fuel. And so car culture met food culture along the nation’s roadways, giving rise to a distinctly American icon: the diner.

Even those with no firsthand experience of real diners still recognize them in the media and through the paintings of John Baeder, a former advertising art director who began creating stunningly realistic depictions of diners for postcards in the early 1970s; today his work is in major museums and private collections around the world.

“I like to consider myself a preservationist first and a painter second,” Baeder said of his diner images. Originally from Atlanta and author of the roadside classics Diners and Gas, Food, and Lodging (first published in 1978 and 1982, respectively), Baeder recalled the impression that diners made on him before he ever considered them subjects for paintings. “I was photographing storefronts and signage, and then a diner would pop up and I would just photograph it because it was new to me, because I didn’t grow up with diners. I sort of saw them as temples from a lost civilization, I guess. I liked the uniqueness of the diner in the way it was placed in its environment, and how different they were in the city as opposed to, say, out in the country.”

What are diners, exactlyand where did they come from?

Along with Baeder, architect Richard Gutman created new generations of diner lovers and rejuvenated older ones by recognizing the structures as vanishing Americana his 1979 book “American Diners.” Now curator and director of the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., Gutman identified the diner in its purest form as a prefabricated building with counter service that can be moved long-distance and plunked down where the owner wants it. More casually, he described diners as “shiny, compact, portable buildings that focused on the counter, where the food was made right behind it, and were clad in materials that made them stand out from other buildings, so that if you’re tooling down the two-lane blacktop, it’s going to stop you in your tracks by the way it looks and by the promise of good food and a nice cup of coffee.”

Indeed, Gutman pointed out, long before diners became retro idealizations, their attraction was “home-cooked food, there’s a wide selection, the prices are good, you see it come out of the icebox and thrown on the grill, and then it’s slid down the counter to you and then you don’t have to do the dishes either. So what’s not to like?”

For the hungry traveler, the family dining out and the worker on lunch break, not a whole lot. In fact, late-shift workingmen were the clientele of Providence, R.I., entrepreneur Walter Scott when he began selling hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches out of a horse-drawn freight car in the early 1870s. Over ensuing decades Scott and his “night lunch wagon” found imitators: The makers of horse cars (the predecessors of motorized buses) began to build conveyances for use as food concessions. When city ordinances started to restrict the wagons’ all-hours custom in the early 1900s, their owners simply lost the wheels, creating the prototype of the diner as we know it.

Ease of transport was an essential feature of diners, which were usually located along highways in order to cater to truckers, a major chunk of the motor traffic through the 1920s. While the Depression spelled disaster for other industries, like the railroads, it spurred a growth period for diners, according to Randy Garbin, founder of “Roadside” magazine and author of “Diners of New England.” “Despite the fact that the country was in hard times, people still had to eat, and there were actually companies that were getting out of their first line of business and starting to building diners, and not surprisingly some of these companies started building railroad cars,” he said. (Small wonder that the classic elongated diner – a term believed to have evolved from “dining car” – is so reminiscent of rolling stock.) The long layout made the counter the diner’s defining characteristic; it also made it easier to clean.

After the Second World War, Americans’ patronage of diners paralleled their ownership of automobiles. Returning veterans were going to college on the G.I. Bill, then getting better jobs. (Some even purchased diners, marketed as great businesses for independent operators.) Families were buying their very first cars. Working people had disposable income. What they needed were places to dispose of it. In the late 1940s and ’50s, diners offered good, familiar food – meat loaf, turkey, BLTs, pancakes – at reasonable prices for travelers and local folks alike.

“The concept of the diner had been in existence for a long time; they were largely populated by workingmen who would go there for lunch or after work, that kind of thing. Now diners were positioning themselves as family restaurants, or at least trying to,” Garbin observed.

A lot of diners’ appeal was physical: They radiated the same modernism of the cars that their customers arrived in. “Diners were pretty outrageous-looking buildings – they were clad in stainless steel, for crying out loud – and they were still very streamlined: They looked like they moved,” Garbin pointed out. “They had what I have referred to as the transportation metaphor, and they kept that into the sixties.”

“Diners used to come out with new models every year, almost like the cars,” noted Harold Kullman, whose father, Sam, began building the now legendary Kullman diners in 1927; now 82, the younger Kullman joined the New Jersey–based business in 1946. “Every year we’d come out with a new design … We would change the corners of the diner – that was sort of a takeoff on the cars – and I guess when Cadillacs had those big tailfins, we were building diners with canopies flaring up from the roofs.”

In the 1950s and sixties, just as independent automakers were driven to extinction by market pressures, the classic mom-and-pop diners – assaulted by fast-food chains and left to languish on backroads by the new interstate system – were abandoned to the curbside weeds or reconfigured into Mediterranean- or Early American–design eateries bearing little evidence of their forward-looking streamlined origins.

But Americans are a nostalgic people, and retro ambiance can be a salable commodity, businesspeople are discovering – even if the “home-style” entrées on the menu now include tandoori chicken, pad thai or stir-fry. Indeed, diners are undergoing a renaissance, and companies like the Kullman Buildings Corp. are still designing them with “The Look” – and even more in-your-face Art Moderne for the twenty-first-century customer.

Try to grab a seat at the counter.

More on diners

View John Baeder’s spectacular diner paintings at www.johnbaeder.com

In addition to the books mentioned above, see Richard Gutman’s “American Diner Then and Now” (Perennial, 1993; reissued by Johns Hopkins University, 2000).

For diner reviews, a diner locater and lots of other great diner info, visit www.roadsideonline.com.

Tour the Kullman Buildings Corp. Web site at www.kullman.com

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