By Colleen Weum
When you visit that national park gift shop, the souvenir store, the little grocery stop while on your RV adventure, do you notice the rack of postcards? Maybe you even buy a couple to mail or keep as a memento.
You are doing what some of your ancestors did as far back as the turn of the last century.
Some folks, like myself, have taken it a bit further and collect postcards, including vintage postcards. Call us “deltiologists,” defined as collectors of postcards. We enjoy the hobby of “deltiology.” This term was invented in 1945, but the collecting of postcards goes back much further. The first postcard was issued in about 1869. The “golden age of postcards” was 1890-1915, the peak of the postcard craze, when roughly a BILLION postcards were mailed each year.
Comic postcards with travel trailers are fun to collect
You will find just about any topic on vintage postcards. One of the several topics I collect are the tacky comic postcards that feature travel trailers. As a result, I have several hundred comic trailer postcards, just a small part of our 90,000+ postcard collection. We have owned various RVs over the years. We currently have a 2010 Casita trailer which we brought home from the factory. So, comic trailer postcards are natural for me to collect.
The images you see here are of postcards produced from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. The postcards are referred to as “linens” as they have a rough surface texture. Linens are traditionally garish in color, adding to the postcard’s unique appearance.
Check out these vintage trailer postcards
As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Here are a few linen trailer postcard images to enjoy.
Colleen Weum and her husband, Ed, are Co-Editors of the Pacific Northwest Postcard Club newsletter. She has been collecting postcards since the 1980s.
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