@Tinkatutu - I’ve been lucky at times when I have gone “antiquing” and have gotten cards at $1 each! Beautiful black and white ones are my favorite - especially architecture and land marks from all over the world. If they are at a good price - or if I am able to barter with the seller at a flea market - I’ll buy some that aren’t quite my taste but maybe a Postcrosser’s (like celebrities, or eeeearly 1900s). You never know when one requests a genuine vintage card! But otherwise I don’t really collect them - I just love the little hunt for them. I tend to buy very few for myself to frame.
If anything, the real hunt is for old/vintage mini-postcard sets (AKA souvenir cards) from Europe that are B&W. eBay has a few but I have had better luck in Europe in general at flea markets.
Edit: once I found a bunch of early 1900 postcards at like $3 and got a few for future postcrossers. I’m not one to resell or think too much of their value. I love to share, not sell
I’ll definitely keep an eye out then. I hope I can find some cheaper ones eventually. Either way, it’s so cool seeing places I know, and how much they have changed over the years.
I just picked up a pile of plastichrome postcards from a thrift shop from the 50’s and 60’s They intrigued me. But I can’t find anything about plastichrome cards in the internet apart from people selling them. Can anyone point me in the right direction. Apologies if I have posted in the wrong place.
Are you talking about the mini postcard booklets / paks? If so, they go by a few names! You/I can start a new thread on this since I myself collect mini postcard paks, AKA souvenir views.
If you’re in the US, Courthouse Square Antique Postcards hosts shows where you can buy vintage postcards for cheap. They also list local vendors if they have a show in your area.
Another good option is reuse art stores. My local one, the Texas Art Asylum, sell tons vintage postcards. I’ve also been to some in other cities and they sell vinatge postcards, usually <$0.50 each.
I don’t think I’m saying anything new here, but in my town I typically find vintage cards at thrift stores, charity shops, used bookstores and antique shops. Note: cards at antique shops are usually much older, significantly more expensive, and often written on. Of course, if you’re collecting the antique ones to keep, that’s not necessarily a problem.
“Vintage” also covers such a huge area. Honestly, I’m never quite sure what people mean when they say they want vintage cards! Etsy refers to anything 20 years old and above as vintage; that’s a pretty low bar. I do come across quite a few vintage cards from the fifties and sixties in charity shops, but they are often fugly, poorly composed, and with the colours on the muddy side – whether they were that way originally or not, I do not know! One I found depicted a so-called “beauty spot” of British Columbia. I had to laugh because it looked like a grey-brown landscape of parched grasses and trees. I’m saving that one for an “ugly” RR as I’m sure not all the vintage card-lovers out there would welcome getting it!
I bought a lot at a thrift store, just for the pics. Many are vintage photographs, some are promotional. All the ones I got are unused, part of my history collection as I also do genealogy.
Here are some of the vintage cards in my collection. The B&W ones are unused and are made with photos from the photographic collection at the Vancouver Public Library, no dates of publishing, but the photos are older than the cards. The colour ones are all used and from the 1950’s-1960’s. Most of these are British Columbia images, except the bottom left one, that is Edmonton, Alberta.
In NYC, there’s the Chelsea Flea Market on the weekends. If you don’t mind wading through the boxes there are some beautiful cards. Depending on the vendor they can be either used or unused.
I was there last month since I was in the area and actually managed to find a night view of Manhattan from my own neighborhood. There’s unfortunately no date, since I would love to know the year of that shot, but it’s still really neat to compare it to the current view (half the skyline is “missing” and there are two working factory smokestacks that are no longer here). It’s genuinely one of my absolute favorite postcards.
On Amazon, I literally typed in vintage postcards and got a box of 20 for $10.98, so $0.55 a card. I didn’t think that was a bad price for a variety pack.
I live in a tiny town of 2,000. We had a new thrift store open and upon seeing it, I joked to my mom that the guy is just cleaning out his own house and tried to sell stuff - it’s that type of thrift store. BUT, good prices and I found an entire box of postcards, mostly blank, from the 50’s through to the 80’s. I buy a few every time that I go in, the box is too big to go through in one sitting. I’ve been using them too, not just keeping them. I mailed out a 1971 card from the Calgary Stampede to someone who said that they liked rodeos.
I guess it’s just pure luck what you can find at thrift stores…
Perhaps you need to clarify what you mean by “Vintage Postcards?”
■ Do you mean postcards published 1900-1940?
■ Or reproductions of vintage images on modern postcards?
as I’m sure not all the vintage card-lovers out there would welcome getting it!
