Monday, April 16, 2018

Souvenir postcard folder albums, c. 1940s - 1970s, USA


Found a basket of about 80 souvenir postcard folders at a local flee market and walked away with the lot for $10. Who can resist so many accordion publications? Popular from the 1940s to the 1970s these accordion strips of photographs were the perfect souvenir for the folks back home and they only cost 1.5 cents to mail from your hot vacation spot. None of the strips in these booklets are perforated and so the strip exists solely as a folded series of photographs, but they still retain something of the original genre that would have included perforations enabling the postcards to be detached and sent on their way. A variety of printing techniques appear over the years, but there is no experimentation with the format or any play within the generic postcard images of the touristic highlights from each location — apart from the two i'm posting below.