Mirror Girl (Reverse Mirror) - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

Curt Teich & Co. was a Chicago-based printer of postcards from 1898 to 1978. Known among deltiologists for pioneering linen postcards and popularizing the large letter style, Curt Teich is beloved by me for the development and use of a numbering scheme indicating the date and printing method of postcard production. In 1982 the Curt Teich industrial archives were donated to the Lake County Discovery Museum. These materials form the core of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection, to which several other collections and archives have been added, including postcards by other printers and publishers. (The featured image is actually a 1908 Martha Steuer card from a series by artist Clare Victor Dwiggins, signed Dwig.) With 2.5 million items at the time of its transfer to the Newberry Library in 2016, the CTPAC is the largest public collection of postcards in the United States. The Newberry has made descriptive metadata records for approximately 400,000 postcards--some 15,000 with accompanying images--available through CARLI Digital Collections. (Note: The contemporary audience should be prepared to encounter potentially offensive early 20th-century attitudes toward race and gender.) The postcards cover a range of subjects and genres: In addition to scenic views, one can find advertising, tourism, souvenir, humor, pinup, novelty, and generic postcards--and of course cats, lots and lots of cats. (Just kidding, not that many cats.)

And that is how to sneak in a few extra items when a collection contains many more than one single interesting image to feature--links, lots and lots of links. Am I done now? Yes, I am.

Written by Ellen Corrigan, Associate Professor of Library Services, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm