Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Attention Post Card Sellers!
- This topic has 8 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 2 months ago by retiredtreasures719.
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08/12/2021 at 9:37 pm #90290
I haven’t been on much lately because I have been volunteering with my local art museum using my library experience to help them reorganize their library. They have 83 volumes of postcards (approximately 28,000 give or take a thousand) from 1890-1930. A long ago benefactor lived and studied architecture in Europe, collected the cards and then they were donated to the museum after he died. I took one volume and roughly analyzed it. It appeared most were selling for $5-12 dollars. There were probably a quarter of the cards I couldn’t find similar cards to compare.
Some of are probably drooling at this point at the dollar’s flashing before your eyes lol! The museum is trying to decide what to do with them. They realize they have value, but don’t want to spend the time selling them themselves. The reorganization of the library will cost a fair amount and the hope is to offset costs by selling items like the postcards. I am asking for any help you- the wonderful scavenger family-can provide by letting me know of auction houses or dealers that can help the museum. I will cheerfully pass on any information that you give me and keep you updated on the progress of the postcards. Thank you in advance!
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08/13/2021 at 1:38 am #90303
I suppose the first thing to check is the condition of the albums themselves. The old postcard albums were made from cheap acidic paper, and the method of holding the cards leads to marks across the corners.
Secondly, the cards that tend to have value are the real photographic ones, i.e. actual photo prints on silver gelatine paper. If he studied architecture into the 1930s he might have collected some interesting cards of modern buildings.
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08/13/2021 at 8:36 am #90307
That’s a lot of postcards! It would take years to sell them individually if you want to get that kind of money for them, but unfortunately lotting them up will result in just a fraction of that in realized prices unless there are some real desirable rarities in there. John Miller of Popeye’s Postcard (eBay ID: spinach-eater) has been the resident Scavenger Life postcard expert for years but he doesn’t come by often. He’s a major guy in the field, also having had a Youtube channel for a while. Probably best to contact him on eBay. He may be able to assist but he’s on the East coast. For that quantity of cards it might be best to find a brick-and-mortar auctioneer near to you who is on Proxibid or one of the other online auction sites for national and international exposure.
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08/13/2021 at 4:54 pm #90319
Yes, really we could do with more information. It could be 28,000 different cartoon postcards of the Manneken Pis (you’d be surprised how many jokes the Belgians can make out of that), or mountain scenery (so many boring photo albums of Alpine holidays) or old churches (unless they’ve been bombed, they’ll look the same today as they did in the 1900s) or Photochrome peasants.
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08/14/2021 at 1:18 am #90325
I go back to the museum on Tuesday. I will look at them and try to give you a better scope of what they encompass. Half of them are definitely related to architectural elements. They have been living in a museum since the 1940s, so they are well preserved. The donor died in 1934, so they are all prior to that date.
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08/14/2021 at 1:53 pm #90326
Great! I’m thinking maybe the best way for the museum to raise funds with them is to produce a monograph about the donor. Reason being, he was training to be an architect, or was an architect, and the postcards he chose would give a view as to his ideas about architecture. The 1920s and 1930s were a period of radical change in European architecture, away from Art Nouveau and suchlike towards movements like De Stijl (Mondrian).
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08/15/2021 at 12:37 am #90335
The expert on postcards around here is John from Popeye’s postcards. I think his forum name is something like Spinach Eater. There was even a Scavenger Life episode about him : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULcZ5ZZ7xc
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08/15/2021 at 5:13 am #90339
As far as I remember, his speciality is American postcards- his buyers typically people who want a postcard of how their town looked like back in the way back when.
That’s the problem with this collection- they’re all European. You’re going to have to connect with nostalgic buyers in Bad Schnitzel and Pericolo di Sporgersi.
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08/16/2021 at 7:32 pm #90366
I’m not going to the museum tomorrow, but I will get back to you regarding the scope of the collection-hopefully Weds.
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