Vintage Halloween Postcards Are Hot Collectors Items

The past few years have seen the prices paid for vintage postcards and postcard albums at local auction houses fly through the roof. Dealers will pay lots of money for bunches of nearly worthless postcards to get a few that have very high value.

There are numerous types of vintage postcards that will sell for two and three figures on such sites as eBay. It may surprise people to know that one of these types of highly collected high-value postcards are vintage Halloween postcards.

Halloween imagery was much the rage at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The years 1907 through 1915, the Golden Age for postcards, produced much of the Halloween imagery we still find today: Orange and black were the predominant Halloween colors, and witches, black cats, Jack-o'-lanterns (called JOLS by postcard collectors), bats and skeletons were imagery used by postcard illustrators. One of the few differences between the Edwardian representation of Halloween and that of today is that the holiday on some of these cards is spelled Hallowe'en, harking back to the holiday's linguistic origins.

There were, however, some additional kinds of Halloween imagery in these old postcards which have largely been lost to history. These include marriage and courtship rituals, directed to young women. These postcards included pictures of witches, children or sometimes Edwardian ladies mixing magic potions and casting spells to insure that they would find their true love were also common. The images and themes were based on centuries old myths involving apple peels, clocks and mirrors, which frequently appear together on these old Halloween cards.

How does one know which vintage Halloween postcards are worth collecting? The answer is that any Halloween postcard in very good or better condition printed between 1907 and 1915 has at least a bit of value from a couple of dollars to much more. There are also varieties of postcards of unusual construction-- which long ago ceased to be produced which command high prices regardless of what subject or holiday they illustrate. Hold-to-light postcards and postcards with plush fringed borders are examples.

For all vintage postcards, their exact value is established by the scarcity of a particular card, the collectibility of certain kinds of imagery (such as Halloween imagery), the illustrator, the general vicissitudes of the postcard market and always-- the card's condition. Corners must be square, the card must be free of significant creases, stains and markings.

If you are serious about collection. buying or selling any vintage postcards,vintage Halloween postcards are a great place to get started. But, there is no way around the need to do much research. However, there are many fascinating website and books which make this a pleasurable task. The following sites were helpful in writing this article and provides an exceptional timeline for the history of postcards. http://www.emotionscards.com/museum/historyofpostcards.htm
and http://www.shilohpostcards.com/webdoc2.htm.