Customer Reviews

American Architecture: A Vintage Postcard Collection

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This wonderful book, beautifully designed and printed, has 625 postcards of American buildings selected from six thousand in the author's collection. He chose these for their relevance and graphic rendering. Most of them probably originated from the Curt Teich company based in Chicago (they printed 360,000 different cards over the years). Van Malderen writes a short informative introduction about his collection and the architectural postcard. The majority show multi-storied buildings, especially skyscrapers but there are plenty of factories, docks, bridges, churches, street scenes and more. The buildings were photographed and then drawn (some artist drew the short straw and had to put all the windows in) to bring out the best of the structure, frequently removing nearby buildings so the original was left in all its glory.

The cards are arranged alphabetically by city, from Atlanta to Washington DC, New York, naturally, has the most, over 150. A nice touch is that some cards have stamps and cancellation marks on them and a few have the sender's handwriting, telling the folks back home that the building shown really is as big as it looks!

For such a lovely book I am surprised that the publishers did not include an index. Two other architectural postcard books worth checking out are `Wish You Were Here' by Barry Zaid, full of hotels (and their interiors) from the thirties and forties and like 'American Architecture' beautifully produced. `Not Only Building: New York' by Italo Rota, a 480 page paperback with 300 postcards. I thought it was rather badly produced, too many enlargements of the cards which unfortunately only emphasise the mass printing quality of the originals.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.