Vintage Tea Room Postcards

From Mystic Tea Room

The beginning of the tea room movement happened to coincide with the the postcard craze, which was in full flower from 1905 until World War One. Even after postcards waned a bit in popularity during the 1920s, many tea rooms kept on printing the, as they had learned that illustrated mailing cards were an inexpensive way to boost their business.

Postcard stamps only cost one cent back then, so in some some tea rooms, when you sat down to order, a pre-stamped postcard showing the room in which you were seated accompanied the menu, and you were encouraged to write a message and mail it to a friend. Thus, today's postcard collectors find many tea room cards with messages on the back that read something like this:

Hello, Edith —
We found this wonderful
little place on the way
to the Falls — Maybe
you can come along next
time and we'll stop here
to eat. The view is lovely
and the food is great.
— Mabel

Dating Tea Room Postcards

On this site you will find many, many interior and exterior views of quaint, old-fashioned tea rooms, as well as the backs of cards, some with messages and some simply indicating the name of the printer or additional information about the tea room.

Dating these postcards can be a little tricky. There are four ways to date a card, and before i turn you loose with the list of what is archived here, i would like to introduce you to some postcard dating techniques:.

Dating Postcards by Era of Manufacture

• Pioneer Era (1893-1898): These are the earliest known postcards. They do not contain images.
• Private Mailing Card Era (1898-1901): The words "Private Mailing Card (in contradistinction from a card produces by the United States Post Office) was required to be printed on these cards.
• Real Photo Postcards, RPPC (1900 to present day): These are direct photographic prints made in a darkroom on a fairly heavy grade of photo paper. The back often will be marked with the brand-name of the paper. Most Real Photo cards are in black-and-white, according to the availability of film in the early 20th century, although a colour photo could be developed on the same kind of heavy paper. Like any photograph, RPPCs are subject to fading in the sun, and should be digitized and stored away from light. Because they are hand-made in a darkroom, RPPCs are ideal for sales to small businesses that cannot afford to pay for thousands of cards. During the height of the RPPC era, from 1900 to about 1940, local or wandering photographers would photograph business exteriors "on spec" and try to sell them the cards. The names of the locations are written in the negative and appear as white lettering. Because they continued to be made for so long, and could be reprinted at will, the fact that a tea room postcard is an RPPC does not provide a solid clue to the actual date of the photograph.
• Undivided Back Era (1901-1907): These cards have the word Post Card on the back, but only the address was allowed on the back, hence any message had to be written in the image area or outside, in the border area.
• Divided Back Era (1907-1915): With the postcard craze in full swing, and collectors wanting un-defaced images, the USPO relented and allowed messages to be written on the left-hand side of the postcard back, as long as the address was written on the right-hand side.
• Chromolitho Era (1905-1918): Chromolithography is a lamentedly lost technique for producing colour prints using fine-grained stones (from Germany) upon which the artist draws in grease pencil to create resists for colour ink lay. A good chromolitho or chromo, as they were called, might have as many as twelve colours of ink blended in the form of tiny grains or dots, to craft the illusion of continuous tone blending. Rarely used for view cards, chromolith was used by artists to create topical cards, and the topics included season's greetings, birthday wishes, and series of 6 or 12 cards on subject matter such as good luck, patriotism, cute animals, and the like. For chromolitho cards about tea leaf reading, see the page on tea-leaf reading in the Fortune Telling Postcards by Fred C. Lounsbury
• White Border Era (1915-1930): With colour printing of photos becoming more common, a particular grade of smooth white index stock was selected, and most companies employed a white border around the edges of the image, for ease of trimming and to keep the presses cleaner. Black and white photos were overlaid with pastel colours of ink to give them the look of colour photography.
• Linen Era (1930-1945): In 1930 a different kind of index stock was introduced, called Linen Finish or Linen, embossed with a pattern that resembled woven cloth. These postcards began as black-and-white photos but were artfully hand-retouched until the finished art was a work of radiant, harmonious colour. The outer borders were ivory in tone, to better set off the fabulous colouring jobs.
• Photo-chrome Era (1939 to present day): Chrome-Coat or Chrome index stock paper is used for printing colour photographs without artful retouching. The mid-century modern colours are often garish. 'Nuff said.

Dating Postcards by Copyright, Publisher, or Series Number

Postcard collectors long ago began indexing and dating cards by the presence of copyright dates, publisher names and addresses, or series numbers. I could go into a lot of detail about such arcane matters, but on the presumption that you are here for the tea rooms, not for postcard collecting minutiae, i will just say that i specialized in roadside linens from Curt Teich for decades, my mother built her own postcard site back in the 1990s, which i have kept online since her death in 2005 (you can find it at [Liselotte Erlanger Glozer's Postcards]) and only good sense and courtesy prevent me from noting which RPPC cards are AZO and which are KODAK, okay?

Dating View Cards by Automobile Models and Signage

For those who know their car makes and models, dating exterior views of tea rooms and other small businesses is a cinch. I know enough to get the decade right; beyond that, i shall say no more. However, when it comes to signage, i am a demon, and i can often date an image by word-usage, logo-types, or techniques of sign-painting. Of course, as with autos, signs will only tell you the earliest date the image could have been photographed. Always remember that an old car or an old sign can be photographed years after having been created.

Dating Postcards by Back-of-Card Fontography

The text on the back of a card — if it has any — will certainly povide a clue as to the decade, if not the year of manufacture. Sho-card lettering, hand-inked deigns, and eccentric type mark the early era, after which we see regular serif type, followed by a mix of serif and sans-serif, and, finally, the domination of sans-serif. Again, at the risk of annoying those who are not typesetters or postcard collectors, about this i shall say no more.

Tea Room Postcard Index

Read about Tea Room History here, and look for the places themselves alphabetically, by State or Nation.

Please note that as we build this site, not every state will have a tea room. Watch us grow!

Tea Rooms of the United States

• Alabama Tea Rooms
• Alaska Tea Rooms
• Arizona Tea Rooms
• Arkansas Tea Rooms
• California Tea Rooms
• Colorado Tea Rooms
• Connecticut Tea Rooms
• Delaware Tea Rooms
• Florida Tea Rooms
• Georgia Tea Rooms
• Hawaii Tea Rooms
• Idaho Tea Rooms
• Illinois Tea Rooms
• Indiana Tea Rooms
• Iowa Tea Rooms
• Kansas Tea Rooms
• Kentucky Tea Rooms
• Louisiana Tea Rooms
• Maine Tea Rooms
• Maryland Tea Rooms
• Massachusetts Tea Rooms
• Michigan Tea Rooms
• Minnesota Tea Rooms
• Mississippi Tea Rooms
• Missouri Tea Rooms
• Montana Tea Rooms
• Nebraska Tea Rooms
• Nevada Tea Rooms
• New Hampshire Tea Rooms
• New Jersey Tea Rooms
• New Mexico Tea Rooms
• New York Tea Rooms
• North Carolina Tea Rooms
• North Dakota Tea Rooms
• Ohio Tea Rooms
• Oklahoma Tea Rooms
• Oregon Tea Rooms
• Pennsylvania Tea Rooms
• Rhode Island Tea Rooms
• South Carolina Tea Rooms
• South Dakota Tea Rooms
• Tennessee Tea Rooms
• Texas Tea Rooms
• Utah Tea Rooms
• Vermont Tea Rooms
• Virginia Tea Rooms
• Washington Tea Rooms
• West Virginia Tea Rooms
• Wisconsin Tea Rooms
• Wyoming Tea Rooms

Tea Rooms of the British Commonwealth

• Canada Tea Rooms
• England Tea Rooms
• Ireland Tea Rooms
• Scotland Tea Rooms

Tea Rooms of Europe

• Switzerland Tea Rooms

catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
The Mystic Tea Room

See Also

• Tea Room History
• Vintage Tea Room Postcards