A few weeks back, on the way from fireworks shopping in New Hampshire, we stopped at a flea market in a field in ‘the middle of nowhere’. Imagine my surprise to find – amidst people selling their own unwanted stuff – two postcard dealers! Their cards were vintage and pricey, but I fell in love with a collection of tiny cards one guy had that had been distributed in packets of tea in the 1960s, so I made him an offer and walked away with the entire binder!
The cards were issued by a tea company called Brooke Bond, and in the USA and Canada came packaged in boxes of Red Rose (brand) tea. They were also issued in several other countries, and were most popular in England where 87 sets were issued over several decades!
The album contained 172 unique cards in eight different series. Six of the series (on birds, plants and butterflies) were for the US market, and two (transport and space) are Canadian. I also have dozens of doubles.
The cards are small – about an inch wide and two tall, and are beautifully printed with lots of information about the subject written on the back. Each series had 48 cards, and from what I can determine were available for a year each, so they would probably have been a challenge to collect!
The cards I have range from 1961 (Wildflowers of North America) to 1969 (The Space Age), which is about when they stopped including them in America (they continued until 1999 in England). They’re in incredible condition: some look like they came right off the press and it’s hard to believe they’re 60+ years old!
While these were inexpensive (I paid $25) I don’t plan on seeking out any more, and this will just live in my trading card collection (such that it is) as a lovely little curio from before I was born. As I said I’ve got a lot of doubles: if you want some let me know.
Coincidentally when I was in Australia I bought two cigarette cards from an antique shop. They were also inexpensive ($1) but were almost 100 years old (the above is from 1930) and I couldn’t resist them. They’re the same size as the tea cards, so this one will live in the same binder forever 🙂
Earlier today I went to what I believed was a local stamp show, but when I got there discovered was actually a postcard show! About a dozen vendors were there selling vintage (what I learned was before about 1963) cards to a room of people mostly older than me, but I found a few $0.25 bins of ‘modern’ cards and spent almost an hour sitting next to an elderly gentleman and chatting with him about his collection of 275,000 postcards!
I learned a lot, but perhaps the most amazing thing was that less than a half hour from our home is a postcard shop with 14 dealers selling all sorts of postcards from the 19th century through to modern times. Guess where I’m going next weekend?
