postcards

Unprocessed postcards

In my time at CMU I have seen thousands of postcards, maybe 10 thousand. Postcards were a cheap, pretty, popular way to correspond with friends and family before cell phones, showing where you lived or had visited, as a keepsake of your trip, and were a boost to tourism. Your friends saw the postcard and thought, we should visit there! Most postcards were and are 3.5x5.5 inches, traditional postcard size, but larger sizes were and still are created. Some of the postcards were mailed and have writing and stamps on the back. Originally, postcards were black and white as they were created from black and white film, then some images were hand tinted, which proved popular. Later, they were created from color film. Some of the images were and still are reproduced on kitchen tablecloths, hand towels, and other items.  Most early postcards included images of major government buildings, businesses, streets and parks, monuments, and other stationery objects. Later you see some people, animals, and caricatures, some racist. Some generic picture postcards, such as shorelines, trees. and deer, were widely reproduced and the only thing that changed from one to the next was the town name printed on it. Train wrecks and ship disasters, centennial events, parades, and other events were popular postcards.

When processing postcards within a larger manuscript collection, we retain those with substantive correspondence between people documented in the collection, while blank Michigan postcards are compared to our Michigan postcard collection to see if they are duplicates, which we do not retain. The few that are not duplicates have the accession number written on them in pencil, are sleeved to protect them, and interfiled into existing folders. We also receive many postcards from other states and countries. Processing postcards is time consuming work. Our Michigan postcards are organized alphabetically by city or town name. Larger cities have multiple folders divided into categories like buildings, streets, parks, monuments, churches, etc. We also have several boxes of national holiday and special event postcards, like Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day that have no direct link to Michigan, but were retained decades ago for use in exhibits. Here are some images.

From top: Black and white, hand tinted, color postcards

Examples of our holiday cards, 2 for St. Patrick's day.