Real Photo Postcard: The Back Dates the Card, Not the Photo

Two small words sit above Benjamin Franklin's portrait on this stamp: SERIES 1902. The card it is stuck to went through the post office at Erie, Pennsylvania, on December 23, 1905, and its picture side carries a note dated the day before.

None of those three dates records the day the photograph was taken. That holds for any real photo postcard, which is a photograph printed on card stock that has a printed postcard back. The back dates the card and its trip through the mail, and about the picture it can only say that the print existed by the time the card was mailed.

What does each mark on the back date?

Read the back as verso evidence: the set of stamps, printed backs and notes on the back of a photograph, each tagged with what it can actually date. A postcard back carries three kinds of mark to sort: a postmark, a postage stamp, and a layout printed to fit the postal rules of its day.

Start with the postmark, the round date stamp applied at the post office. On this card it reads ERIE, PA. and DEC 23 1905, with wavy cancel lines running across the stamp beside it. A postmark dates the day the post office handled the card, and on this card it is the strongest date there is.

The stamp comes next. It is weaker than it looks. SERIES 1902 is the name of the stamp design, printed on the stamp itself, and this page did not read when that series was first issued. The same design turns up on a card postmarked less than three years later, further down this page.

The printed words on the card stock carry no date at all. What they do carry is a layout, and a layout can be read against the rules that the post office printed for cards like this one.

What did the 1907 postal rules say about the back?

The rules a card had to meet are in print. Order No. 195, signed in Washington by Postmaster-General Geo. B. Cortelyou on March 4, 1907, put the “Supplement of 1907” into effect. It collected the amendments made to the 1902 edition of the Postal Laws and Regulations since April 1, 1902.

Section 418 covers “Private mailing cards (‘post cards’)” in the domestic mails. A card could be no larger than 9 by 14 centimeters and no smaller than 7 by 10 centimeters, and the words “Post Card” at the top were left to the sender. The page gives the sizes in inches as well, about 3 9/16 by 5 9/16 inches for the largest card and 2 3/4 by 4 inches for the smallest. Then comes the paragraph behind what is now called a divided back: “The face of the card may be divided by a vertical line; the left half to be used for a message, etc., but that to the right for the address only.”

The other conditions are practical ones. The card had to be substantially like the Government postal card “in form and in the quality and weight of paper,” and it could be any color that did not get in the way of a legible address and postmark. Cards that met the conditions went for 1 cent each in the domestic mails.

Open the diagram full size

A card that missed a condition was not simply refused. Paragraph 4 says it was charged by the character of its message, at the letter rate if it was written on in whole or in part, or at the third-class rate if it was entirely in print. Cards bearing particles of glass, metal, mica, sand or tinsel could be sent only inside envelopes.

Notice the wording. It runs the other way from everyday speech. In the rule book the address side is the face, and paragraph g says “Advertisements and illustrations may appear on the back of the card and on the left half of the face.” By postal usage, then, a real photo postcard carries its picture on the back, although this page keeps the everyday usage, where the back is the address side.

The Supplement has a limit. Its explanatory note says it prints only the paragraphs that were amended, and it never says when the dividing-line paragraph first took effect. So 1907 marks a year when the rule was in force, not the date it began. The Postmaster-General's annual reports might say more, but this page found no copy of them that it could read.

The next section of the Supplement, Sec. 418½, points the same way from abroad. Post cards mailed in foreign countries with a written message “upon the left half of the front,” the right half kept for the address and postmark, were to be delivered in the United States without extra postage if they were fully prepaid and followed the Rome convention.

Undivided and divided backs, side by side

Here is the divided layout in use on a later card. A printed line splits the back, with SPACE FOR CORRESPONDENCE on the left half and THIS SIDE FOR THE ADDRESS on the right. The full scan on Commons shows a handwritten message on the left and the address on the right, and only the printed right half is shown here.

The circular postmark names a place ending in “N.Y.” Its month starts with an S, which only September does, and its year reads 1908, though the day is unclear in this scan. The stamp is again a one-cent Franklin printed SERIES 1902, so the two cards on this page share a stamp design while their postmarks sit less than three years apart.

The 1905 card has no line. Its whole back reads THIS SIDE FOR THE ADDRESS, and the sender wrote the greeting on the picture side instead, in the space around the photograph.

That fits a back kept for the address, but it does not prove which rule the sender followed, because the rule text in force before the 1907 Supplement was not read for this page. A printed layout can also stay in use after a rule changes, as long as old card stock is still on hand.

What about the stamp box?

Paragraph 3 of Sec. 418 describes the stamp box. When printers and stationers made post cards for sale, “it is desirable that they bear in the upper right-hand corner of the face an oblong diagram containing the words ‘Place postage stamp here.’” The word is desirable, not must. On both cards on this page the stamp covers that corner anyway.

This page found no maker's record or postal record that dates a photographic paper maker's name printed inside that box. It treats such a mark as a clue to look up elsewhere, with no window of its own.

What can the photograph side date?

Look at the print itself. A woman in a wide hat and a man in a cap pose together by a white post on deck, with rigging and other passengers behind them. Nothing in the print is a date, and the ink note under it names a ship, the S.S. Parisian, without saying when the shot was taken.

The card gives one hard edge, because the photograph was printed on this card before it was mailed on December 23, 1905. This page's estimate for the exposure is on or before December 23, 1905, on a ship the note names as the Parisian, with the card mailed from Erie, Pennsylvania. The evidence is medium for the end date, because the postmark and the note dated the day before agree, and there is none for the start. Narrowing the start would need a record from outside the card, such as a dated letter, a family paper or a record of the voyage, and this page did not look for one.

The same gap between a date on an object and the date of what it shows turns up elsewhere on this site, on a newspaper comics page in Little Nemo and in trade-paper reports on Gertie the Dinosaur.

How to date a real photo postcard, clue by clue

Open the diagram full size

Work from the strongest mark to the weakest, and write down what each one dates before moving on:

1. Find the postmark. It dates the day the post office handled the card, and the photograph was printed on the card no later than that day.
2. Read any handwritten date. It is the writer's own date for the note, which can come at any time after the card was printed.
3. Check the layout of the back. A dividing line matches the rules in force by March 4, 1907, without giving the day those rules began.
4. Read the stamp. Its series name dates the design, not the day the stamp was used.
5. Look at the stamp box last. A paper maker's mark is a lead to check in other records, not a date.
6. Report a range, a place and a strength, and never a single year for the photograph.

The full list of eight clues, each row with its window, region, strength and source, is in the data file. The habit of reading the card before the picture also applies to the stereograph, another photograph mounted on a card.

Download the back clues for real photo postcards (CSV) · source and license notes

Questions about real photo postcard backs

How old is my real photo postcard?

Start with the postmark, if there is one. It gives the day the post office handled the card, and the photograph was printed on the card no later than that day. The back gives no start date for the picture, so a careful answer is a range that ends at the postmark.

What does a divided back mean?

A divided back has a printed vertical line on the address side, with the message on the left and the address on the right. The US postal rules in effect on March 4, 1907 allowed this for domestic post cards (Sec. 418 e), but the 1907 Supplement does not say when that paragraph first took effect.

Does the stamp date the card?

Not by itself. The one-cent Franklin stamps on both cards here are printed SERIES 1902, yet one card was mailed in 1905 and the other carries a 1908 postmark.