Found Foote Photo #6: Postcards!

I was excited when this email arrived in my inbox from a vintage postcard collector:

"I just acquired this Foote & James portrait postcard. (It has 'Foote & James, Winnipeg' embossed in the lower left corner.)

It makes sense that they would offer postcards of their portrait photos - as postal rates for postcards were cheaper than for letter mail. Images on postcards were the most cost-effective way to send your fiends/relatives an image of yourself.

Several companies sold photographic paper with pre-printed postcard imprinting on the reverse side to photographers.

This is helpful for us postcard collectors to approximate the age of postcards, like this one, which were never mailed. This particular one has an AZO Stamp Box - with four squares in the corners.

Using online resources (like this site: http://www.the2buds.com/rp.htm), we can come up at least with date ranges for cards produced on the more popular photographic postcard papers.

In this case, the Foote & James portrait card was made sometime after 1926 through to the 1940s."

- Rob McInnes, Postcard Accumulator and Purveyor