In the process of looking through junk and/or consignment shops (and trying not to bring home dozens more blasted books), I sometimes run into bins full of old post cards. Mostly, and especially if they're unsorted, I don't try to really systematically search them..... but once in awhile, like a couple days ago, it seems worthwhile to see what treasure is in there.
There's no particular reason why one appeals to me except that it's cool -- or, in this case,
....that it's strangely cool-looking and that I have actually heard of the place (thanks to my online acquaintance with ronniecat!). I always wonder who took a trip and bought it in around 1910, and how the bleep the post card ended up in a basket in a shop in South Carolina.
UPDATE : Thanks to the aforementioned ronniecat, and a link in her comment, I found a beautiful video of this bay and why it's a natural wonder - click here for it!
Sometimes, a card is just beautiful :
I have no relationship with Rome, Georgia, but I love the old cars in this street scene:
Dante gets a glimpse of Major Babe, Beatrice:
There was a whole series from the Tower of London. This is the one that first caught my eye. I love the choice to photograph the Armoury through this stone entrance :
Lincoln's birthplace:
And this one just had the Awwwww! factor :
The time it took to go through the card basket kept me from getting into worse trouble buying dorky Cold War textbooks. Like I did last time we went secondhand-shopping.
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| Man's Story: World History in Its Geographic Setting. By T. Walter Wallbank. Published by Scott, Foresman, 1961, and apparently the third edition. |
They're cheap enough, since nobody on earth but me wants them, but they weigh a ton and take up an awful lot of space.
And yet....somebody has to preserve this stuff! It's part of our history! Yeah, that's it.
Not to mention that it's full of little groaner cartoons in which a bespectacled character named "Hy Story' (Get it?) drops in on various eras and crassly disobeys the Temporal Prime Directive by being in and possibly messing up history:
4 comments:
That postcard of the Hopewell Rocks is amazing! Fundy Bay boasts the highest tides in the world, and the claim to fame of that particular place is that when the tide is out (as it is in that picture) you can literally walk on the bottom of the ocean floor. Those rocks are in water many metres deep when the tide comes in. (A picture of them at low and high tide is on this website: http://roadstories.ca/vote-for-fundy/ ) Awesome :) and thanks for the shout-out.
Aha! I wondered if this might be a place you told us about *years* ago. I can't remember if it was in a blog post or a comment, and maybe a comment on somebody else's blog, but it made an impression! And thanks for the link, which led to a great video that I'm going to add to the entry.
That is a beautiful video, Ruth, and thanks for tracking it down and sharing it. To save some potential googling, here's the list of the "winners" in the New 7 Wonders of Nature voting. As the Wiki article notes, there are reasons to be skeptical about the results... but at least the contest produced this wonderful video!
I love these postcards! And I also love the way Blogger now displays images when you click on them. That might be enough to get me to kick-start my blog -- or not. Mike Peterson's example of proliferate excellence notwithstanding, it's still a lot of work.
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