Postcards from the edge
MANILA, Philippines - Postcard collecting, as with other collecting hobbies, has gone in and out of fashion over the years. It has appealed to a very wide range of collectors and has been strongly influenced by current events and changes in technology. Once considered the domain of armchair travelers, little old ladies and retirees with little better to do, postcard collecting has evolved into a serious field of scholarly research. Postcards provide a wealth of information regarding modern social history, fashions, folklore and the development of photography as an art form. With the renewed interest in collecting over the last two decades, prices have increased worldwide, and thousands of vintage cards have been reproduced and published in books and periodicals. In addition to their historical and commercial value, postcards have provided countless hours of pleasure to thousands of collectors around the world.
Picture postcards have been collected from the time they first appeared in Europe, in the late 19th century. The most popular area of collecting has been geographic location. Collectors search for pictures of their hometowns or cities to observe what changes have taken place over the years and remind them of the way things were. Other popular areas of collecting are by subject matter, such as pictures of Santa Claus, witches, or favorite animals such as cats or dogs. Many people collect pictures of celebrities or royalty. In the Philippines, Carnival Queens is a popular subject. Advanced art collectors often focus on just one subject as famous hotels or railroad trains. One collector I knew only purchased pictures of sailors in uniform. The list of subjects collected around the world is quite amazing: everything from naughty “French” erotic cards from the turn of the century to postcards showing Florida crocodiles are methodically tracked down and collected.
In the Philippines, most collectors have general collection covering everything Filipino, but as collections continue to grow, more people will undoubtedly start to specialize. Some already have, concentrating on individual cities such as Cebu or Baguio or ethnographic cards depicting Muslim groups or Cordillerans. Several of the most avid collectors of Philippine cards live in the United States where both the number and condition of cards available tend to be better. Common Philippine cards in good condition usually sell for less than P500. Sharply focused and real photo cards of some interesting subject matter can sell for P2,000 to P3,000.
Condition is very important. Postcards, as with all things made of paper, quickly deteriorate in a hot and humid climate. Without air-conditioning and knowledge of archival storage methods, it is difficult to properly maintain a collection for very long. Bright light, humidity, insects and excessive or careless handling can quickly destroy fragile cards.
Standardized government-issued cards without pictures first appeared in Europe and America in 1860s and 1870s. These are commonly referred to as “postals” and were the forerunner of picture postcards. These are eagerly collected by stamp collectors and fall into a separate category of their own. The Spanish government produced a series of these in various printed denominations specifically for the Philippines. Unfortunately the acidic paper used was of poor quality and they have not aged well. Postmarked examples of these Spanish “postal” cards are very rare and quite a find for serious postcard or stamp collectors.
Images on cards first began appearing in the 1880s and 1890s, first as advertisements and then as souvenirs of expositions in Europe and America. During the 1890s there was considerable confusion. Messages, images and stamps often appeared on the same side and in the United States, at least, cards cost as much to send as letters. In May 1898, the same month America occupied the Philippines and began administering its postal service, American rates for cards were reduced and regulations streamlined. The undivided back of the card was designated for stamps and the address while an image and message was allowed on the front. This was in line with the system adopted in Europe where postcards had become very popular. The fad immediately took off in the United States and spread to the Philippines by way of the arriving American military and civilian administrators. These first mass-produced, standardized cards popular from 1898 through 1901 also bore the message “Private Mailing Card” and are referred to by collectors as such. Any cards produced before this period are referred to by collectors as “pioneer cards” and are often unique and always quite valuable if well preserved.
Postcards continued to be printed with “undivided backs” but without the “Private Mailing Card” message until about 1907. The image on the face of these cards was often small, leaving just enough room for a very short message. In 1907 a space for a message was designated on the left side of the back and a stamp box and space for a mailing address were placed on the right, usually with a ruled lined dividing the sections. This “divided back” format has been continued up to the present. However in the early days of production there were numerous variations. After the government notation “Private Mailing Card” was discontinued, publishers began to print the term Post Card or Carte Postale on the back along with their own names and logos. Some cards have elegantly printed backs, with captions and the names of publishers and printers while others are left practically bare with only a simple dividing line and stamp box if that. The design of the stamp box is often the best clue as to the date of manufacture.
Manuel Arias y Rodriguez, a Spaniard born in Manila in the 1860s, and his brother Vicente were both expert photographers and operated a bookstore and publishing firm, Agencia Editorial, on Carriedo in Binondo. Around the turn of the century they produced a small series of cards, about a dozen different images, using their own sepia-toned photographs. I have not been able to determine if any of these were printed and used before the arrival of the Americans. However many of the photographs were taken before 1898 and the cards do not state they are “Private Mailing Cards.” The backs simply state “Carte Postale-Union Postale Universale.” This was in keeping with the European format of the time.
Dating early postcards can be quite tricky as old photographs were occasionally reproduced years after they were taken, then postmarked years after they were printed. Old photographic images continue to be reproduced today. When in doubt, it’s important to ask dealers the approximate age of the card itself especially when buying on the Internet. There are actually three dates to keep in mind: the date the image was made, the date it was printed or developed and the date it was postmarked if it was mailed. Many early cards were bought as souvenirs or collectors’ items and never mailed.
From a historical point of view the date the image was made, whether it be a drawing or photograph, is the most important. Later reproductions and copies usually are of poor quality and have little value for collectors. However an interesting postmark can greatly increase the value of any card. This then crosses over into the area of philately or stamp collecting rather than deltiology, the formal term used for postcard collecting. The first postcard mailed from the Philippines with a United States government postmark in 1898 has tremendous value far beyond its esthetic importance as an individual card.
For collectors of Philippine picture postcards, the early series of cards produced in the first decade of the 20th century are considered the most beautiful. They are not necessarily the rarest as they were produced at the height of an unprecedented postcard boom. However, the quality of these chromo-lithographic cards has never been surpassed. Initially a black-and-white photo was taken and from this a black-and-white lithographic plate made. The images were then hand-colored and subsequent color plates were made, sometimes with the addition of clouds in the sky and imaginative coloring for indigenous costumes. Most of the printing and coloring was commissioned by American and European postcard publishers and done in Germany, which had the finest printers. The First World War, starting in 1914, abruptly ended this international industry and signaled a decline in the quality of cards.
During this golden age of postcard production from 1900 through 1914 numerous Filipino, American and European publishers issued sets of Philippine cards. The largest series of several hundred different images was started in Manila by a Leon J. Lambert about 1907 and bore his name on the back. He initially issued a series of cards in black and white depicting tribal minorities and views of Manila and the provinces. Usually the caption was in red and the image occasionally had two or three light colors added. In 1909 he joined with Milton Springer to form the Lambert and Springer Company and much more sophisticated color plates were used. For several years this partnership produced many of the most beautiful cards ever made of Filipino people and views. In time the company broke up and the same images with different colors and declining quality can be found under new logos. This loose exchange of original images with no identification of the photographers was common practice until well after the Second World War.
The Lambert and Springer Company was only one of many publishers selling Philippine cards at the time. The combination of the world postcard fad and the news of the Philippine Revolution and subsequent Philippine-American War created a tremendous demand for Philippine cards. Thousands of cards were made for American military personnel, government administrators and teachers arriving in the Philippines between 1898 and 1912. The artist Fernando Amorsolo and art collector Alfonso Ongpin, among others, were avid postcard collectors at this time and exchanged Philippine cards with enthusiasts in Europe and North America.
In Manila, Squires & Bingham Company was the largest distributor offering cards with undivided backs right after the Philippine-American War. In San Francisco the famous postcard manufacturer Edward H. Mitchell issued a set of 33 beautiful Philippine cards while in New York the Hagemeister Co. also printed Philippine cards. In England the largest producer of “art cards,” Raphael Tuck & Sons, issued a dozen cards showing scenes of Manila rendered by artists, as part of their “Oilette Series” of world views. Some of these paintings were based on old photos dating from 1880s. Postcards designed by well-known artists are an important category for specialized collectors.
American anthropologist Dean Worcester first came to the Philippines in the 1880s and took thousands of pictures of different tribal groups. He was appointed to the Philippine Commission under the American regime. Along with photographer Charles Martin, his ambition was to document all aspects of Philippine life for the new American administration. Worcester’s photographs were prominently exhibited at the Saint Louis World’s Fair and Charles Martin was appointed the first official government photographer and headed the Bureau of Science for many years in Manila. Their photographs appear in several of the early postcard series.
For specialized collectors of Filipiniana, the souvenir postcards of the Philippine exhibits at the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904 and those made for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, Washington in 1909 are of special interest. They focus heavily on the “exotic” ethnic types of the Philippines with one especially lurid card showing near-naked Igorots roasting a dog as American fair goers gather around to watch. American politicians used these provocative images to justify the need for American’s tutelage and colonial guidance of the Philippines. However, in fairness to the organizers of the Saint Louis Fair, they did try to downplay these provocative displays. The fair featured beautiful examples of high-quality art and culture from the Philippines, but the American press was more interested in dog-eating natives than reproductions of Philippine architecture or Fabian de la Rosa paintings.
Several promotional postcards from the various hotels, restaurants and “Clarke’s” — a famous ice cream parlor on the Escolta — are fine examples of Art Nouveau designs. Soon after the Manila Hotel first opened in 1912, it printed a series of handsome black-and-white cards depicting the various luxurious amenities offered by the then ultra-modern establishment. Many cards portraying the life and times of Jose Rizal were issued and are still very collectable today. Even the competition for the Rizal Monument was depicted on a panorama card, printed before the monument was erected in 1909. American military bases in the Philippines, battleships and newly built American infrastructure were popular subjects. William Howard Taft’s visit with American First Daughter Alice Roosevelt in 1905 was documented on postcards, as was Taft’s later trip in 1907. In the early years of the American occupation, before radio, television and telephone service, postcards helped disseminate information and functioned as a subtle form of propaganda.
In conjunction with the more decorative chrono-lithographic color cards and other beautifully designed printed cards were photographically produced postcards. These were real photographs, developed and mounted with postcard backs. The earliest commercially produced cards of this type I have seen date from just after the end of the Philippine-American War in 1901. The earliest have oval images, which was consistent with the first prints produced by Kodak’s “Brownie” cameras. As roll film and easily portable cameras became popular, Kodak camera shops began to develop film directly on postcard mounts. This became a popular way to create and send personal souvenirs and became quite a fad lasting right up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1941.
Among postcard collectors these have come to be known as “real photo cards” and they are in fact actual photographs and not offset prints or lithographs. The surfaces of the cards tend to be glossy like a photograph and the black-and-white or sepia tones blend evenly together. Occasionally these postcards/photographs were hand-colored with indelible ink, producing mixed results. Quite often the ink would not retain its original color, would bleed on the glossy surface or degrade in some other way. The finest hand-colored photographic cards were made by Japanese studios here and in Japan. They developed their images on matte-surfaced, absorbent papers, delicately colored them and sold them in albums, which protected them from bright light. Actual color photographs were not used for commercially printed postcards until after the Second World War in the 1940s.
Real photo cards have become very popular with collectors in the last few years and their value has now surpassed that of the common printed cards for a number of reasons. Initially they were not popular with collectors because they were less decorative than the artistically designed printed cards and they tended to depict more mundane subjects. It is this very detailed photographic documentation that has now made them so valuable to collectors and research institutions such as museums and libraries. Scholars and popular historians have found that real photo postcards are a great source of illustrations for magazine articles and coffee-table books. In our increasingly visual culture they are being used as background material for historical television documentaries and on numerous web pages on the Internet. A popular photograph was often reprinted from the same negative or an inter-negative produced from an earlier print; however a great many were only printed once and are therefore rare. The copyright alone, for the one-time use of an important or unique image, can be worth several hundred dollars.
In the early years from 1901 to 1920, real photo postcards were commonly used to make informal views of streets and buildings around Manila and portray American military personnel, carnival queens and private individuals. The Americans were especially curious about the costumes and customs of the disappearing tribal groups throughout the country. Photo postcards were used to document the continuing fighting between the Americans and the Muslim Filipinos in the South. Some of the earliest show Filipino prisoners in chains, massacres and even decapitations. Natural disasters also brought out the cameras and there are pictures of typhoon damage, Manila’s perennial floods and scenes of major fires. The whole town of Olongapo burned to the ground on Feb. 22, 1910, and this is vividly illustrated in a series of real photo cards. Numerous cards depict the violent eruption of Taal Volcano in 1911, which buried hundreds of victims and created a macabre wasteland around the volcano.
As the years progressed and more and more photo studios opened in Manila and the provinces by the 1920s, portrait photographs mounted as postcards became popular. Ironically many of these studios, from Baguio to Zamboanga, were run by Japanese photographers who later turned out to be spies. The fad for individual portraits and group shots lasted until the Second World War. Thousands of these photo postcards still exist in old family albums and on the shelves of antique dealers and in junk shops. They are interesting illustrations of the changing fashions in clothing and hairstyles but they tend to be repetitive.
Among these however one can occasionally find an image, that has unusual charm, is unusually humorous, documents a unique costume or is of an important person or social event. Girls enjoyed dressing up as Igorot maidens or in Japanese kimonos, while others — both boys and girls — posed in fanciful studio settings. Most of these cards were printed on sepia. Unlike the commercial picture postcards produced for foreign tourists, these cards capture poignant moments in national life, sometimes on a very personal level. Weddings, funerals, baptisms and first confirmations are all well-documented. Often an affectionate note, in Filipino or Spanish, can be found on the back of an alluring portrait of a handsome young man or demure girl. Aesthetically, and as social history, some of these cards have tremendous value.
Just before the war the Philippine Education Company (PECO) published an extensive series of printed color postcards with distinctive white borders with straight or deckled edges. The series illustrated most of the major buildings in Manila and around the country. It included views of streets, landscapes, tribal peoples, and flora and fauna. The cards with rough deckled edges are referred to as “alligator” cards in America. On many of the PECO cards the surface of the paper was embossed to look like linen. These are known as “linens.” This was a very common format in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, however, not many seem to have survived in the Philippines. The PECO cards were manufactured by the Curteich Company in Chicago, one of the largest postcard manufacturers in the world, using a newly patented printing method. The original images were taken from photographs and extensively reworked by artists in a uniform style using an airbrush and a wide range of soft pastel tones. Unsightly wires and trashcans were airbrushed out, giving the images an idealized appearance.
Modern postcards, from 1950 onwards, have started to interest Philippine collectors. So many changes have taken place in Manila over the last 50 years that these cards are now important reminders of what the city looked like and what life was like a generation or two ago. Color photo cards of the Leandro Locsin-designed Rizal Theater in Makati or the famous Art Deco Jai Alai Building on Taft Avenue are definitely collectors’ items. Both buildings are now gone forever. Advertising cards from the 1950s and 1960s depicting restaurants, hotels, period automobiles and politicians, sometimes one and the same, are very collectable. Cards portraying memorabilia relating to the martial law years and the first People Power Revolution are valuable documents for historians and will soon be prized collectors’ items.
For collectors in the Philippines, finding vintage postcards has been difficult. The revival of the postcard-collecting hobby is relatively new to the Philippines. The necessary infrastructure for collecting was only established in the last 10 years. In Europe and America there are literally thousands of well-organized dealers who specialize in postcards and paper ephemera. They have national and regional meetings on a regular basis and publish slick monthly trade journals advertising public and private postcard auctions and all the latest supplies necessary to maintain collections. Some of the latest products offered to collectors are sophisticated computer software for making cross-referenced files, archival-quality acid-free albums and boxes and safe, chemically inert polyethylene plastic sleeves for individual cards or album pages. There are numerous reference books on specific areas of collecting and painstakingly researched catalogs of popular subject matter. International Internet auctions have had a tremendous effect on the hobby, with many Philippine collectors very active bidders.
For collectors the best source of cards in Manila would be the antique shops scattered around the city — in Ermita, Makati and the various malls. Many dealers in stamps and coins and postcards as well, gather regularly at Quezon City Sports Club at bourses and public auctions. Meetings are sponsored by the Bayanihan Collectors Club, which also holds a fully cataloged international auction of Philippine collectibles twice a year. Many dealers and collectors advertise in this catalog, which can be used as an informal director for anyone starting out on a hunt for vintage postcards.
Two books on Philippine postcards came out in 1994. The first by Conrado F. Ciriaco, Catalogue of Philippine Picture Postcards — American Period: 1898 – 1941, is aimed at the serious collector and dealer. Ciriaco outlines the history of Philippine postcards and catalogs over twelve hundred cards, illustrating most of them in color in reduced format and estimating their value. The same year I published Philippine Picture Postcards: 1900 – 1920, aimed at a more general audience and illustrating 180 of what I believe are some of the most beautiful and historically interesting Philippine cards. Both books are still in print in soft-cover editions.
No essay on Philippine picture postcards would be complete without mention of Michael G. Price of the United States. He has assembled the largest collection of Philippine cards in the world and has written several carefully researched articles about Philippine cards. Price has always been supportive of other collectors and made his collection available to researchers. Abraham Q. Luspo Jr. of Manila has also put a great deal of time and effort into cataloging early Philippine cards and making them available on his Internet web page.
Informal chats with other collectors and friendly dealers have always been the best way to gain valuable information and lead to new sources. As in all fields of collecting, the old cliché “knowledge is everything” is certainly true for Philippine postcard collecting. The more one knows about Philippine history, culture and geography, the easier it is to spot the rare and valuable cards and create an important collection. What I find most enjoyable about collecting is that the more one collects the more one learns about Philippine history; as the collection grows so does one’s knowledge.
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Reprinted from Consuming Passions: Philippine Collectibles, edited by Jaime C. Laya, and published by Anvil Publishing Inc., 2003.
