Postcards

Halloween: Romantic Art and Customs of Yesteryear Postcard Book

Martin Parr: Parrworld

Martin Parr's vast collections of photography books and postcards are world-renowned. Unbeknownst to many, he is also an obsessive collector of photographic and themed objects. In Parrworld: Objects and Postcards, a luscious two-volume set, his affinity for focused accumulation is presented with appropriate thoroughness, and with typical Parrian humor. Some of the items in the first volume, Objects, have already achieved notoriety--for instance, the wrist watches featuring Saddam Hussein's visage. Others mythologize well-known figures such as Lenin and the Spice Girls. Then there is the kitsch--from wallpaper to trays and objects commemorating Sputnik, Charles and Di's wedding and 9/11. While Objects is the first publication to document Parr's 25-plus years of such collecting, Postcards is the "last word" on an extraordinary collection of over 20,000 cards. Presented in album format, it is a highly entertaining yet serious study of postcard history, and includes early cards that depict local news events such as car crashes and murders. The book finishes in Boring Postcards territory with a selection of cards promoting motorways and shopping.
Objects is introduced by Parr and Postcards features an introduction by Thomas Weski, curator of the companion exhibition, Parrworld. This remarkably designed set is bound to appeal to a wide audience, but in particular to Parr collectors who thought they already owned everything Parr.
Martin Parr, born in Epsom, England in 1952, is the author of more than 30 photography books, including Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight, Boring Postcards and Mexico. His photographs are held by museums worldwide, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London. Parr is a member of Magnum Photos.

A Year in Japan

Ordinary scenes from Japanese life take on a captivating charm in these 30 postcards.

Collector's Guide to Post Cards

Over 2,000 post cards are featured in this interesting and informative look at this popular paper collectible. It contains a special full-color section and displays cards on subjects of holidays, trains, children, military, and many more. 2003 values. AUTHORBIO: Jane Wood is the author of the bestselling Collector's Guide to Postcards, which is continuously reprinted with updated values. REVIEW: This book continues to be a proven seller and is reprinted with updated values. It provides an excellent overview of postcard collecting, with the work of many different artists shown, some publishers, and other categories. Categories include Christmas, Indians, World War I, Advertising, Harrison Fisher, Novelty, Blacks, and Political.

Antique Advertising Postcards in Full Color: 24 Ready-to-Mail Postcards from the Bella C. Landauer Collection (Card Books)

The Golden Age of Postcards: Early 1900s Identification & Values (Identification & Values (Collector Books))

Heart of the Home Postcard Collection

Mary Cassatt Cards: 24 Cards (Card Books)

The Stamp of Fantasy

Essential for ephemera aficionados, fans of Surrealism and proto-Surrealism and for anyone prone to spending more time in a museum's shop than in its galleries, The Stamp of Fantasy vindicates the postcard as a medium with a history as rich as the mediums it helped to foster, such as photomontage and mail art. In presenting the most fantastical postcard images from the early twentieth century, this book may be the opposite and complement to Martin Parr's famous Boring Postcards series, stuffed as it is with disembodied heads, hybrid humans, erotic imagery and drawn modification. If the great French filmmaker Georges Melies had produced postcards (instead of films on a postcard scale), they might resemble these miniature works by diverse hands, selected from the esteemed collections of Peter Weiss and Gerard Levy for the touring exhibition of the same name. The book tracks the overlap between so-called "fantasy" postcards and the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, principally Dadaism and Surrealism. Paul Eluard, Andre Breton and Salvador Dali were enthusiastic collectors of fantasy postcards and Hannah Hoch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material in their work. Marcel Duchamp's famed 1919 detournement of a "Mona Lisa" postcard, "L.H.O.O.Q," may be one of this book's guiding precedents, at least for drawing attention to the postcard per se--but plenty of anonymous artists contribute equally irreverent and inventive tweakings, as well as more hallucinatory amendments. The Stamp of Fantasy is a wonderful celebration of the small gesture, amateur inventiveness, folk Surrealism and art's most democratic form of reproduction.

The Devil in Design: The Krampus Postcards

A collection of vintage Christmas cards for very bad little girls and boys. The Devil in Design is a fascinating, full-color compendium of extremely rare, late 19th and early 20th-century Krampus postcards culled from key postcard collections from around the world. Lavishly illustrated with over a 150 striking and stylized full-page examples, the book also includes a short introduction tracing the character's origin and its overwhelming popularity throughout Europe. In the Christmas traditions of Europe, the Krampus is Saint Nicholas's dark servant—a hairy, horned, supernatural beast whose pointed ears and long slithering tongue gave misbehavers the creeps! Whereas Saint Nicholas would reward children who had been good all year with treats, those that had been disobedient were paid a visit by the Krampus.

The Krampus terrorized the bad until they promised to be good. Some he'd spank; others he'd whip, while others he'd shackle, stuff into his large wooden basket, and then hurl into the flames of Hell! Such scenarios were delineated by skilled and imaginative Old World craftsmen, printed on penny postcards and disseminated throughout Europe.

The Devil in Design is the first English-language book to offer this breathtaking collection of the finest, rarest, and most visually-stunning Krampus cards history has left to offer. 168 pages full-color illustrations.