A Canadian Family

Neon Signs / Modern Times

For the July 2009 issue of A Festival of Postcards - SIGNS – I’ve decided to share something relatively modern from my collection “Postcards of St. Catherine St. in Montreal”.

I specialize in early twentieth century b/w vintage postcards, but since Montreal has been my family’s hometown for the last fifty years, I do sometimes collect more modern postcards. Today I’m showing a Colourpicture Publishers plastichrome postcard and instead of sharing an anecdote from my family history, I’m going to show you some of the clues I used to date the card.

Dating the postcard

One thing I appreciate about signs on a postcard is that they provide invaluable clues to the age of the postcard – or at least the age of the image on which the postcard was based. The clues are in the materials used (e.g.wood, metal, plastic) as well as the style and the actual symbols or text on the signs

Movie Marquee at the Palace

I always like to see a marquee on a postcard because it gives me the first bracket for the date range. In this case, the Palace was showing the  movie Lydia Bailey starring Anne Francis, and that tells me that the postcard doesn’t predate 1952.

Lydia Bailey was based on the book by the same name which was authored by Kenneth Roberts. You can find out more about this from Danny McDonald blog (Kennethlroberts) in his post  A Blast from the Past: NY Times Review of “Lydia Bailey” the Movie.

Advertising Sign – … be sure! Read more »

July 25, 2009 Posted by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault | . | A Festival of Postcards, advertising signs, Montreal, movie theaters, neon, neon signs, signs, vintage advertising, vintage sign | 6 Comments