Wish you were here

The Golden Age of postcards was 100 years ago.

Today, the New Mexico Postcard Club is actively collecting, trading, selling, buying and cataloging postcards old and new, paper or otherwise.

"You don't find them much anymore, but (they're also made from) wood, aluminum, copper, wood bark," club head Nancy Tucker said.

She has a wooden postcard made by artist Jenny Holzer.

Member Sheldon Heckman said he got into postcards after buying one as a gift.

"I found this postcard that was printed on leather, and I hadn't seen that before," he said. "I started to wonder what other postcards were out there."

His two major collections are old postcards of Santa Fe and the Virgin Islands.

"I used to live in the Caribbean," he said. "It reminds me of where I used to live and where I live now. You can see a picture of a street you're familiar with and see these different buildings on the street. In Santa Fe, San Francisco Street - which is pretty much a tourist place right now - 80 years ago was just a dirt street."

Collecting postcards blends a love of art and history, and it can bring nostalgia to the well-traveled or work as a means through which the more sedentary can live vicariously.

The club meets Saturday in Botts Hall at the Special Collections Library at 423 Central Ave. N.E. from 2 to 4 p.m. to hear Richard Melzer talk about his new book about the Fred Harvey Houses throughout the Southwest. Afterward, they will bring out their cards for a lively discussion and some buying and selling.

"The Harvey Houses were kind of railroad hotels," Tucker said. "The most famous was the Alvarado here in Albuquerque, and he used a lot of postcard images in his book, so he's going to show images from the book and talk about these hotels to people who are interested in postcards."

This would be a good day for people with old postcards stashed away to bring them to the meeting, Heckman said.

"We're always looking for new members, but we're also looking for postcards," he said. "We're always looking for someone with an old collection."

It depends on the collector whether writing on the back will raise or lessen the value, Heckman said.

"Some people really scribble and erase and, to me, it detracts from how the card looks," he said. "If their handwriting is neat and it says more than, 'Wish you were here,' it's a little more interesting."

Tucker buys most of her Albuquerque cards off eBay and often competes with a man in El Paso, Texas, who shares her same taste for postcards. Prices range from 5 cents to $10,000 for a card, Tucker said.

"He and I will bid each other up on certain cards to the point where we've literally spent hundreds of dollars on a particular view of Albuquerque," she said. "I paid over $500 for a card. It was what's called a real photo view, which is an actual photograph of the old Alvarado Hotel. I wanted it and a fellow in Richmond, Virginia, wanted it and the guy in El Paso. We all wanted it bad. And I won."

New Mexico Postcard Club meeting

Saturday, 2-4 p.m.

Special Collections Library in Botts Hall

423 Central Ave. N.E.

To contact the club, call Nancy at (505) 323-5020 or e-mail

TheSandiaKid@aol.com