What You Need To Know About Vintage Postcards

What You Need To Know About Vintage Postcards
by: Kathy Penn

One thing to ask yourself is which postcards are valuable? There are books that set a standard price range which can be a good guideline, but when it comes right down to it the book is only good as a general guideline. The value is in the collector's mind and what he will pay for it. It all depends on the collector as to what he collects and is looking for. One might collect Michigan postcards; another might collect bridges; another might collect his home town; another might collect birds; another might collect Black Americana, etc.

So if you have a geographic specific post card it would be a good idea to try and sell them at a flea market in the area of where the postcard is based. Also if you have an old postcard from a business you could try contacting the business where it stands now and see if they would be interested.

One thing to know that will help you determine the value of a postcard though is the availability of each card. The fewer there are the more valuable they will be. One good idea is to monitor the value of a by monitoring the local trends. Google has a website that displays the trends of whatever you type into it. You can check out the trend for postcards here. (http://www.google.com/trends?q=postcards) This site will show you the latest news and break down the latest trend by geographical location.

At the time of this writing Google Trends displayed news about postcards containing Cold War spy messages being unearthed. You can be sure that if you come across these postcards that the value of them has raised due to the local publicity of the news.

You can find vintage postcards for resale by going to rummage sales, auctions, estate sales, eBay, flea markets, and the internet. Similarly, you can also sell the postcards at the same locations; it is just a matter of spotting the bargain postcards for resale.

So how can you tell if you find a good bargain?

One thing to look out for is reproductions. Since reproductions are not worth as much as the originals it is important to be able to spot the difference and here is how you do it.

An obvious one is to look for a stamp. Is it a 1 cent or 2 cent stamp? Then more than likely it is genuine.

Check the postmark of the postcards, if it has an old date chances are it's an original. There are not many reproductions out there that are that old. You can also tell by the paper of the postcard. Originals mostly have a slight yellowing of the paper; and most old postcards have light soil marks on them and they have a musty odor on them from being in storage for so long. Reproductions usually look too new, are printed on an off white color, and don't look like they have been handled too much. A lot of the old postcards have on the back of them the name of the publisher; where they were printed; and some have series numbers as well. Of course, they could have been copied too but this gives you something extra to look for. After handling a lot of postcards you can almost tell right away if it's a reproduction or not.

Another good idea is if you spot a postcard that you wonder is valuable or not you could look it up on your phone if it has internet access on such sites such as eBay to see the current going rate.

Source:articlecity.com