Greetings from Curt Teich

I recently came across these early-1950s postcards in some family papers:




At first I thought I would just post the vibrant, evocative artwork because it's worth sharing, but then I noticed the little words in the lower left corner of the Miami card: Curt Teich & Co., Inc.

And now I know that Curt Teich was a German immigrant to the U.S. who started a printing company in Chicago in 1898 at the age of 21. He came from a family of printers. The "greetings from" format originated in Germany, but Teich brought it to our shores after visiting his native country in 1904. His crew of hundreds of salesmen worked with businesses across the country to create idealized images of their places and sell them to the newly mobile public.

Teich lived to be 97. He died in 1974 and the company closed in 1978. Its archives are in the midst of being transferred to the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Consisting of over 360,000 images related to more than 10,000 towns and cities in the U.S., Canada, and 115 other countries, the Teich industrial archives also contains photographs, prints, sketches, and other layout materials documenting the creation of many of the company’s postcards.

Yet another reason to visit that amazing place!

Here are three online archives of Teich postcard images:

• The Bowden Postcard Collection at Miami University Libraries
• Illinois Digital Archives (which includes some of the collection that will be at the Newberry Library) 
• The Newberry's online archive so far

To see the collection at the Newberry in person, find out the details here.