General postcards, 29 Mar 2006
This book gives you an idea of where to start if you are a first time collector of USA postcards. Packed with illustrations from cover to cover and useful for its approximate valuations. Includes Christmas cards, 4th of July, trains, churches, aircraft, ships as well as featured cards by Brundage, Griggs, Fisher and the publisher Tuck

"Today I sent my first post cards--they are capital things, simple, useful, and handy. A happy invention". This prescient diary entry for 4 October, 1870 came three days after the Post Office Act legalised the sale of the first postcards, a form that would survive even the advent of email more than a century later. It would remain reliably constant, while in its small, rectangular way illustrating a century of human achievement. Occasionally enigmatic, sometimes passionate and frequently banal messages collectively narrate an intimate social history, usually expressed through a faithful, haiku-like formula--greeting, weather, health of writer, inquiry as to health of correspondent, and goodbye. While aviation, advertising, cars, wars, fashion, politics and ethnicity provide leitmotifs, Royal Academician Tom Phillips, whose own prolific art has recurrently embraced quintessential English mores, astutely celebrates the marriage of the democratic language of mundanity and the imagery of the monumental. From cards sent during the Blitz by senders more preoccupied by the rain than by the falling bombs, to Donald McGill's timelessly saucy ribaldry, the medium spans and connects a century it seems unlikely to outlast for too long.

Each year has four pages, the first of which shows a full-size reproduction, plus a brace of cards depicting Piccadilly Circus and New York (unconsciously echoing the publisher's name). The passage of time sees cards come from further afield, passing into gaudy Technicolor, and then the modern photographic image, but while the emblematic New York skyline glitters with an increasingly towering swagger, by 1999 its London counterpart is still a red Routemaster bus, perhaps a suitable reflection of respective self-worth. Phillips curates with a keen eye, on and within the card, ensuring no scrap of detail goes unnoticed in his pleasurably digressive notations, and, like photographer Martin Parr (a fellow collector who also relishes grubbing around at dusty fairs), he is compelled by a complicated affection. In the same vein as Parr's Boring Postcards, it re-affirms an underrated, rich medium of the vernacular, as well as Phillips' position as one of Britain's most versatile artists. --David Vincent

General postcards, 29 Mar 2006
This book gives you an idea of where to start if you are a first time collector of USA postcards. Packed with illustrations from cover to cover and useful for its approximate valuations. Includes Christmas cards, 4th of July, trains, churches, aircraft, ships as well as featured cards by Brundage, Griggs, Fisher and the publisher Tuck

A classic, 13 Nov 2000
This is a brilliant and fascinating book. Whatever your interests you'll be entertained, amused, educated and moved by this unprecedented history of real life, changing times, personalities, social trends, fashion and the just bizarre. Months of browsing, and years of reference guaranteed!!

Boredom amounts to the same in any culture, but English photographer Martin Parr, who curates Langweilige Postkarten (Boring Postcards Germany) as he did its precursors, Boring Postcards and Boring Postcards USA, has elevated it to an art form in all. What this new collection illustrates graphically is the remarkable similarity between post-war Britain and Germany, in terms of cube-shaped (rather than Cubist), grey, functional designs, unaccountably celebrated in card form as urbanscapes to cherish. Which, with retrospective post-modern irony, they are. Such kitsch could be over-sold, with rhapsodising commentary, but Parr has allowed the imagery space, which is the only way such a project could succeed. Consequently, the cumulative effect is considerable, as you start to manoeuvre through the monotony, eager to spot subtle difference, defining features, and socio-historical meaning. Very quickly, the eye starts to sort the images of East and West, not just through the makes of car (Trabant in the GDR, anything but in the West), but the architectural designs, people's clothes, even the image selection. Roads are straight, service stations, or Autobahn-Raststätten, severe (one stunning card reveals a particularly drab canteen with people sitting meekly at tables, despite all the food displays being closed), petrol filling stations abound, and the key word seems municipal. Even hotels, indulgers of weary flesh, resemble bunkers, or faceless public housing.

Arrayed as if in a family photograph album, the images recall a bygone age of post-war reconstruction, when the emphasis was on logistics: transport, accommodation, and a general, unfussy, symmetrical solidness, symbolised by bad design, and worse upholstery. It's both awful and awe-inspiring, this industrial sprawl and set-square architecture, the bleakly familiar caravan-lined coastline. There is also, presumably to the delight of the curator, a run-of-the-mill, mock-Alpine gasthaus named Hotel Parr. And yet, this is life, as rich in its resurgent functionality as Gaudi's flamboyance. Best enjoyed with a tepid flute of Liebfraumilch, and Kraftwerk on the stereo. --David Vincent

General postcards, 29 Mar 2006
This book gives you an idea of where to start if you are a first time collector of USA postcards. Packed with illustrations from cover to cover and useful for its approximate valuations. Includes Christmas cards, 4th of July, trains, churches, aircraft, ships as well as featured cards by Brundage, Griggs, Fisher and the publisher Tuck

A classic, 13 Nov 2000
This is a brilliant and fascinating book. Whatever your interests you'll be entertained, amused, educated and moved by this unprecedented history of real life, changing times, personalities, social trends, fashion and the just bizarre. Months of browsing, and years of reference guaranteed!!

Postcard scenes from a postwar world., 03 Nov 2001
This, the third book in the series, is perhaps the most successful. The previous books (of British and American postcards) seemed little more than typical 1950s and 60s retro-kitsch because they lacked the particular historical context that this book has, with its depiction of postwar German society in denial of its catastrophic Nazi past.

These postcard views have no grandiose classical architecture and few scenes that evoke a sentimentalized Germanic past. Instead what we are shown is a calm, clean world of (then) ultra-modern social housing and road networks, of safety and prosperity. All traces of the old pre-war Germany are absent, save for the occasional church spire peeping modestly over the tops of newly constructed facades.

General postcards, 29 Mar 2006
This book gives you an idea of where to start if you are a first time collector of USA postcards. Packed with illustrations from cover to cover and useful for its approximate valuations. Includes Christmas cards, 4th of July, trains, churches, aircraft, ships as well as featured cards by Brundage, Griggs, Fisher and the publisher Tuck

A classic, 13 Nov 2000
This is a brilliant and fascinating book. Whatever your interests you'll be entertained, amused, educated and moved by this unprecedented history of real life, changing times, personalities, social trends, fashion and the just bizarre. Months of browsing, and years of reference guaranteed!!

Postcard scenes from a postwar world., 03 Nov 2001
This, the third book in the series, is perhaps the most successful. The previous books (of British and American postcards) seemed little more than typical 1950s and 60s retro-kitsch because they lacked the particular historical context that this book has, with its depiction of postwar German society in denial of its catastrophic Nazi past.

These postcard views have no grandiose classical architecture and few scenes that evoke a sentimentalized Germanic past. Instead what we are shown is a calm, clean world of (then) ultra-modern social housing and road networks, of safety and prosperity. All traces of the old pre-war Germany are absent, save for the occasional church spire peeping modestly over the tops of newly constructed facades.

This is an outstnading reference on Children's Postcards, 08 Apr 2001
As the author of The Encyclopedia of Antique Postcards, I would like to recommend Peter Cope's book to all collectors of postcards of children artists. This book is extremely well researched, contains fabulous illustrations, and an extensive biography on many of the heretofore unknown artists of postcards that feature children and Nursery motifs. Few books of late have contained so much useful information. Much work has been done to also provide collectors information on the titles and numbers of cards created by each of the illustrated artists. Having created several books on collecting myself, I much admire the effort and time taken to complete such and extensive work on one subject. While many of these postcards were published in the United Kingdom at the turn of the last century, they are available for purchase at major postcards shows throughout the United States now. I wish to congratualate Mr. Cope on a job very well done. Susan Brown Nicholson