Recent Acquisitions, October 2025
The postcard above was sent to Mr. Danuel S. Buford of Paris, Texas on May 19, year unknown. Shipping out of Dallas, it features an original folk art drawing of soldiers in a row, rendered on a typewriter. The front notes “Not as well as I can but as well as Mrs. Grandberry—perhaps a former typing instructor? It’s an amazing original work; based on the condition, coloring, and one-cent postage stamp we’re estimating it’s from 1930 or prior. Maybe towards 1919 and the end of WWI based on the content.
Long before ASCII art and alongside the growing popularity of typewriter art, some print houses experimented with monotype and block type setting, sorting characters out by density to create a greyscale set of sorts. A few examples of these appear over the years in the journal The Inland Printer. This is from around the 1930s.
The text in the blurb above reads:
“Remarkable portrait group composed on the monotype at The Queensgate Press by Battley Brothers Limited, London, England; shown here (reduced) through the courtesy of the producers. The original sheet is 247 inches wide and contains approximately 130,000 pieces of type, including spacing material. Represented are England's Royal Family-King George VI, Queen Elizabeth. Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret Rose. Viewed from a distance, the picture reveals photographic and halftone characteristics”
Below is another page from the same issue of The Inland Printer:
We love this cover celebrating National Air Mail Week, 1938. It’s got the Seekonk, MA stamp for May 19 at 10AM, and another great stamp featuring a black goose, for which the town is named. The art notes sponsorship by John T. Goggin, who you can see a photo of over here via UMass Amherst’s digital collection. There’s also a good blog post over at Baccy Pipes on with the letter’s intended recipient, the Penn. Tobacco Co. of Wilkes Barre, PA.
