“Design can be art. Design
can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.”
Paul Rand
John Beagles & Co was one of the most
prolific publishers of photographic postcards in Britain up to the 1930s and
specialized in stage stars. This was published before World War 1 so the idea
of remembrance is uncertain. The tulips (?) generally refer to love – which
makes sense in an image filled with beautiful women – and the horseshoe of
course means luck, but ‘remembrance’ normally implies mourning and while it
wouldn’t be strange to publish a series of cards intended to be sent to the
recently bereaved it would be odd to design such a card filled with a collage
of famous actresses. Possibly it refers to John Beagles himself, who died in
1909. The company could have produced a series commemorating its founder
showing portraits from some of its best known cards.
Barnstaple is a small town in Devon, which
at the beginning of the last century only had a developing reputation as a
tourist destination. The postcard was published by J. Welch & Sons of
Portsmouth. If the publishers were using templates sourced from elsewhere they may
have had little to do with the design of the finished product and may not have
even supplied the scenes of the town. The motifs could have been used for any
town in Britain and it is also possible that the letters with their collages of
women and girls were created elsewhere. The price for a photographic postcard
in England was a penny and even though some are on record as selling in the
hundreds of thousands, it’s unlikely that Welch & Sons would invest any
time on the typography for a card selling in small town Barnstaple. Note the
collage of the girls and women. It is a feature that can always date a postcard
to being pre World War 1; not because the war had anything to do with it but
because fashions changed.
No account of typography and design in
photo postcards can be complete without examples from the Reutlinger studio.
They produced the most sophisticated examples and dominated the French market.
A comparison with the Barnstaple card is enough to show why. Even though the
studio mass produced images and recycled the photographs - this portrait of
Gilda D’Arthy would appear on at least half a dozen other designs - there was
always a sense that if the postcard wasn’t unique it was different. This comes
from a series employing the Art Nouveau typography and featuring a woman
against the backdrop of a lake. Together the letters spell out ‘Reutlinger’ and
the idea was for people to collect the full set. Another statistic from 1903
indicates that of the nearly 200 000 000 postcards bought in Britain that year,
only a quarter were posted. The real market lay with collectors and the trick
was to make sure they always returned to buy more.
Postmarked 1930 but most likely produced in
the 1920s, this Freudian double entendre urging Dad to use his cane and repopulate France
was a response to the huge loss of life in the First World War and the 1918 flu
epidemic, which together accounted for over two million deaths, or around five
percent of the population. Even before the turn of the century, France’s
population had been considered too low for full economic prosperity. It
wouldn’t fully stabilize until the 1960s, when with independence millions of
immigrants from former colonies in Africa and the Middle East arrived. We don’t
know how successful this campaign was but it’s doubtful Mum would have been too
thrilled at the prospect of thirteen children.
The Rose Stereograph Company was founded in
Melbourne in the 1880s by George Rose, a man who realized that for a
stereographic company to thrive it needed international scenes and the best way
to get them was to do the travelling himself. By the 1920s the market for
stereographs was in decline and the company turned to producing postcards.
Mostly, it appears, the postcards were standard topographical scenes but this
is an inspired example of what could be achieved with a little imagination. I
can’t say I’ve seen anything else quite like it and the inclusion of the
waratah with the eucalyptus flowers suggests the template may have been
particular to the company and not sourced from elsewhere. Note the sign on the
building at the right for Martin and Pleasance Homeopathic Pharmacy. Like the
Rose Postcard Company, it is still in business.
From the 1930s onwards the strongest
challenge to the real photo postcard came from brightly coloured linen cards
and in the U.S the Curt Teich Company ruled that roost. There’s good research
on the company with stories of a small army of salesmen travelling desert
highways and offering lonely gas stations and motels such tempting ideas as the
addition of a couple of girls in bikinis to the image at little extra cost. The
large letter linen postcard with the name of the place, town or city writ large
is a distinctly American vernacular. Large letter photo postcards are not as
common though in some ways they are much better. The photos in this postcard
were taken by the Nevada Photo Service but we are more interested in the
illustrations. Lew Hymek was a newspaper cartoonist in Reno during the 1930s
and 40s, the era when the town suddenly boomed on account of relaxed gambling,
and divorce laws before mob town Las Vegas took all the attention. Obviously
there was a collaboration between Hymek and Lawrence Engel, who operated the
Nevada Photo Service, and because this is a photographic postcard it could have
been produced and published by the Nevada Photo Service. A linen card version
would need to be sent to somewhere like Curt Teich that had the printing
technology. This is better than a linen card because it displays Hymek’s skills
and it has that cowboy glamour we associate with Reno when North Virginia St
was still worth visiting.
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