Designer
Curt Teich & Co, others
Year
1909, 1936, 1941, 1949
Client
Self, Ottenheimer Publishers, others
“Greetings from Baltimore”
Colorful offset printing and inexpensive linen cardstock combined with Americans’ nascent love of automobiles and travel to create a boom in the popularity of picture postcards in first half of the 20th Century. Travelers could send home images from their travels for just two cents — a penny for the postcard and a penny for the postage.
This series of postcards — displaying influences that range from Art Nouveau to Modernism — are examples of ‘large-letter’ design style celebrating the city of Baltimore. A “Greetings from Baltimore” postcard would allow a traveler to send home multiple Charm City images often framed within letters spelling out B-A-L-T-I-M-O-R-E. This design style was first popularized in Germany in the 1890s. American companies were picking up on this trend in the early 20th Century as shown by the two 1909 postcards here.
Curt Teich, a printer who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1895, started a line of “Greetings from…” postcards in 1904. An early adopter of offset printing, Teich patented many printing techniques that allowed him to produce brilliant colors including ‘Colortone,’ a five-color process used on the cards seen here from 1936, 1941 and 1949. Teich’s company employed hundreds of travelling salespeople who visited cities to sell the concept, staying to take photographs that could later be retouched by their art department to use in postcard designs. Curt Teich & Co. would go on to create “Greetings from…” postcards featuring images from more than 1,000 cities in all 50 states.
Sources Cited
https://archivesspace.ubalt.edu/repositories/2/resources/95
Heavy Metal Madness: Greetings from Big Letters USA
The Artful History of Vintage Travel Postcards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_postcards_in_the_United_States
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/immigrant-story-behind-classic-greetings-from-postcards-180970894/”
