Greetings from Baltimore Postcard Series

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 are examples of ‘large-letter’ design style celebrating the city of Baltimore. A “Greetings from Baltimore” postcard allowed a traveler to send home multiple images of Charm City, 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, and American companies were picking up on the style 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, was the leading source of large-letter postcards, having started a line of 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, respectively. Teich’s company employed hundreds of travelling salespeople who visited cities around the country, selling the concept and staying to take photographs that could later be retouched by their art department for 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.