Vintage Postcard Lots

It's not uncommon that someone finds a box of vintage postcards in the attic, or a whole collection that they don't really want to go through one by one. For postcard lovers, these vintage postcard lots present an excellent opportunity to dig for treasures. Postcards that have been sent and postmarked have a particularly voyeuristic appeal. Can you make out the handwriting? What did the message mean to the sender and recipient? Some collectors covet the colorful high-rag-content linen postcards with white borders produced between the 1930s and 1950s. Others are looking for travel or souvenir postcards depicting a particular location whether that's their hometown, the national park system, New York City, the state of California, or the country of Japan. Other vintage postcard lots are collections of greetings for a specific holiday like Christmas or Valentine's Day. Some collectors gather vintage postcards just for messages of love or romance. Other lots might focus on sports, military, aviation, animal, flower, pin-up, comics, or artist-signed postcards. When considering the purchase of a postcard lot, try to understand if it has a general topical theme, who the collector was, and what overall condition the cards are in. Then get ready to be surprised.