How to Date RPPC | Part 2: The Card
How do you date (or price) RPPC?
The heyday of RPPC lasted from 1906-1920, generally speaking, but photo cards were sent well into the 1950s. It may seem daunting to pin down when a piece of paper lived its life, but we're here to help. This Ephemera101 blog gives a brief overview of how to date RPPCs.
Most RPPC went through three "life stages": when the photo was taken, when the card was printed, and when the photo postcard was sent. In Part 1, we went over how to date RPPC based on the photo. In this section, we discover clues from the card itself.
The Card: Clues in the Paper
The most obvious temporal marker of a card is the backside: does it have a divided back or not? Cards before 1907 had no dividing line: the correspondence section wasn't allowed in U.S. postcards until March of 1907.
Our RPPC Two Women Rowing on a River in Southern Michigan (left) is from pre-1907. The other RPPC, Two Young Women Enjoying a Lake (right), is from 1910. You can tell in the side-by-side comparison that the pre-1907 postcard only has space for an address!
You'll often see people writing on top of the photo on the card's front since they had no room on the back, like in our 1906 Poag's Hole postcard:
Apart from the correspondence, you can check the stamp box at the top right of the card for a paper manufacturer mark. Common U.S. marks include AZO, EKC, Aristo, or Velox for Kodak brands, but also Rotograph, Cyko, or Defender (1). Playle’s RPPC site gives a detailed chart of which stamp box designs correspond with which date ranges. For instance, our RPPC of Young Boys in Play Clothes shows a stamp box with AZO and four upward-pointing triangles in the corner (left), but our RPPC of Capt. Lindbergh's First Gear Shift Auto shows a stamp box with AZO and four corner squares (right).
In another example, our RPPC of a train wreck (below) features a CYKO stamp box and divided back with no Name or Correspondence labels.
Bogdan and Weseloh’s RPPC guide has a handy index of Cyko postcard back designs by date in the appendix (1).
Our train RPPC back most closely resembles the Cyko 6 design, entry A2.68 on page 233 (below) – with an earliest known date (EKD) of 1915, we know our card was likely made in the late 1910s or 1920s.
1. Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography by Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh (link).
