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59 books match the query 'Antiques & Collectibles' and 5 start with p

cover of Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo

Picturing Illinois

Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle

University of Illinois Press, 2012

The American picture postcard debuted around the start of the twentieth century, creating an enthusiasm for sending and collecting postcard art that continued for decades. As a form of popular culture, scenic postcards strongly influenced how Americans conceptualized both faraway and nearby places through portrayals of landscapes, buildings, and historic sites. In this gloriously illustrated history of the picture postcard in Illinois, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle study a rich and diverse set of images that chronicle what Illinoisans considered attractive, intriguing, and memorable. They also discuss how messages written on postcards reveal the sender's personal interpretation of local geography and scenery.
 
The most popularly depicted destination was Chicago, America's great boomtown.Its portraits are especially varied, showing off its high-rise architecture, its teeming avenues, and the vitality of its marketplaces and even slaughterhouses. Postcards featuring downstate locales, however, elaborated and reinforced stereotypes that divided the state, portraying the rest of Illinois as the counterpoint to Chicago's urban bustle. Scores of cards from Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, Urbana-Champaign, Quincy, and Vandalia emphasize wide-open prairies, modest civic edifices, and folksy charm. The sense of dichotomy between Chicago and the rest of Illinois was, of course, a substantial fallacy, since the city's very prosperity depended upon the entire state's fertile farmlands, natural resources, and small industries.
 
Jakle and Sculle follow this dialogue between urban Chicago and rural downstate as it is illustrated on two hundred vintage postcards, observing both their common conventions and their variety. They also discuss the advances in printing technology in the early 1900s that made mass appeal possible. Providing rich historical and geographical context, Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo illustrates the picture postcard's significance in American popular culture and the unique ways in which Illinoisans pictured their world.
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cover of Portraits in a Nutshell: The Art and History of Coquilla Nut Snuff Boxes and Bottles

Portraits in a Nutshell

The Art and History of Coquilla Nut Snuff Boxes and Bottles

Donna S. Sanzone

Brandeis University Press, 2025

A gorgeously illustrated look at snuff boxes and bottles carved from the Brazilian coquilla nut reveals a larger history of commerce, cultural exchange, and power in the Atlantic world.
 
Portraits in a Nutshell showcases intricately carved snuff boxes and bottles sculpted from the Brazilian coquilla nut between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Both utilitarian and decorative, these bottles and boxes were produced and used by diverse people of wide-ranging geographic origin, racial background, and social standing. As a result, coquilla nut snuff boxes present a rich material archive of the Atlantic world and the central role of Indigenous and Black histories within it.
 
Despite being just three or four inches long, these coquilla nut snuff boxes encapsulate an early modern history of transoceanic movement and creativity. The carvings depict animals and fantastical creatures, scenes of religious and courtly life, portraits of political and military leaders, abolitionists and activists, and people at the margins of colonial society. These images are available to the public and to scholars for the first time in this book and will be of interest to antique collectors, art historians, social historians, and anyone interested in the unusual and the curious.
 
Over 250 detailed photographs of snuff bottles and boxes from the unique and wide-ranging collection of David Badger not only illustrate the exceptional skill of their creators but also tell the story of millions of Africans transported to Brazil during centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. The text demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world, the movements of peoples and ideas, and the commercial exchange of goods and cultural and material objects in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. In this beautiful book, these objects reveal a story never before told.
 
With a preface by Matthew Francis Rarey, associate professor of African and Black Atlantic art history at Oberlin College, and an introduction by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Arthur Ross Gallery.
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cover of Postcards from Utopia: The Art of Political Propaganda

Postcards from Utopia

The Art of Political Propaganda

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009

Politicians are famous for making extravagant campaign promises. But there are few promises as powerful—or as idealistically utopian—as those put forth by state-sponsored propaganda. Collected here are colorful images of political ideology created and disseminated by the political regimes of Europe, the Soviet Union, and China from the 1920s through the ‘70s.

State leaders of the twentieth century were highly conscious of the need to present a unified national image during a time of serious political transition in Europe, and state-sanctioned art performed a key function in an attempt to consolidate a country behind an idea. These spectacular images provide a rare opportunity to witness how abstract political ideas were rendered as visual picture for a mass audience. Fifty compelling postcards, held in the collection of the Bodleian Library, from the former Soviet Union, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania, reveal that despite national differences there are surprising similarities in political expression and the idealized images presented by each government. An introduction that contextualizes the images within a broader understanding of the ideologies and political powers of the time is provided by European historian, Andrew Roberts.

Taken together, the images in Postcards from Utopia offer a striking look at the art of power and its mythical representation at a time of great political upheaval and experiment.

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cover of Postcards from the Baja California Border: Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s

Postcards from the Baja California Border

Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s

Daniel D. Arreola

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.

This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.

 
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cover of Postcards of Lost Royals

Postcards of Lost Royals

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009

This enchanting, unique collection of postcards recovers an old world swept away and forgotten over the decades. The lost royals captured here have not been misplaced or gone missing—what has been lost is the very foundation of their royalty. Collected here are royal figures from around the world who lost their titles and were displaced as a result of World War I and other early twentieth-century political movements.

            The royal houses of Europe, Africa, and Asia once ruled a continent and held dominions beyond the seas. Today, just ten monarchs still reign in Europe, and those with only limited powers. Captured in these distinctive postcards held in the collection of the Bodleian Library are these lost emperors, kings and queens, czars and czarinas, princes and princess, and grand dukes and duchesses, who were left behind by the sweep of history. Featuring monarchs from the Balkans to the Iberian Peninsula, from Ethiopia to Korea, these portraits include members of the Russian imperial family, and royals from Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany, among others. But this is more than just a picture book; it provides a narrative snapshot of world history—alongside each postcard is an intriguing mini-biography of the pictured royal that provides a gripping account of his or her story.

            Reminiscent of a forgotten era of glamour, grace, and regal power, Postcards of Lost Royals brings history to life and distills the essence of a long-vanished world of royalty.

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