BEER POSTCARDS FROM THE COLLECTION

Some of you folks may be aware that I've blogged in other forums over the years. From 2006 to just this year, I wrote passionately about craft beer on the beer-dedicated blogs Hedonist Beer Jive and Beer Samizdat, with a short detour in which I posted about beer right here on The Hedonist Jive. I've also acquired a bit of a taste for postcard accumulation - some might call it collecting - thanks to a habit borne of my late Grandmother's having passed along her postcard collection to me. I liked having them around, sure, but it wasn't until I visited San Francisco's Vintage Paper Faire last year that I decided to go full bore into actually collecting my favorite genre of postcards, which is cheeseball motels from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I even started a blog early this year in which I scan my various motel postcard finds and share them with the people called The Postcard Motel.

The aforementioned Vintage Paper Faire comes around twice a year in SF - in fact, it's happening again in a couple of weekends. This summer I found a dealer who'd take my grandma's surplus postcards, the ones I didn't want, and who gave me $200 in trade for a couple boxes of her dregs. After grabbing all of his best motel cards, and a few vintage roadside Americana cards to boot, I decided to spend the rest of my credit on a few 1920s & 1930s cards that sprang from one of the other passions of mine: beer. Because postcards were such a strong advertising lingua fraca back in the day, both brewers and those peddling novelty used them as a means for distributing their messages, whatever those happened to be. Here are a few that I picked up this past summer that I thought you might enjoy.