Between about 1905 and 1915 the United States had a postcard golden age: cheaper mail, “divided back” cards that freed the whole front for an image, and better commercial printing. In the same window, “tall-tale” or “exaggeration” postcards peaked — cut, collaged, and re-photographed to produce absurd scales. The most popular subgenre was produce.
This Public Domain Review collection centers on California, and on one publisher:
- Each card in the featured series shows a single rail car rolling through lush farmland, loaded with gargantuan produce — dimpled navel oranges, a dusky bunch of grapes, mottled walnuts.
- The publisher is Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco, prolific and product-driven.
- Laid end to end, the cards make “a colorful train crossing California’s fertile valleys.”
- Unlike the busier tall-tale cards with farmers, fishermen, and children for scale, Mitchell’s are empty of people. Sharply lit, the colossal cargo leans toward artwork rather than gag.
Thea Applebaum Licht’s introduction notes the best of them: “A Carload of Mammoth Apples,” green-yellow and gleaming, “could have been plucked from René Magritte’s The Son of Man.”
Two things are worth naming. The genre runs on boosterism — regional abundance as national advertising, in the decades when western agriculture was being sold to the rest of the country. And the technique is straightforward image manipulation, cut and re-shot, mass-produced and mailed by the million, decades before Photoshop made it trivial.
The full set of high-resolution scans is at the source link, from the Library of Congress collection.