Sunday, March 26, 2023
Wish You Were Here, from B. Cory Kilvert
This scarce card required some research. It gives every indication of being a newspaper giveaway, and originally coming on a sheet like the Hearst cards, where recipients have to cut out the individual cards. Poking around the interwebs I've managed to find a few other cards of the same design, where you can read the text at the bottom which has flaked off of my card. It says "Copyright 1904 by Associated Sunday Magazines, Inc."
This company came into being at the end of 1903, and supplied magazine sections to subscribing newspapers in the same way as McClure and others supplied boilerplate comics sections. Evidently in 1904 they decided to sweeten the pot with a postcard giveaway in those magazine sections. They even went to the trouble of customizing the postcards with the names of the subscribing papers.
Other cards of this design cite various other newspapers, the Boston Post being one of the more common. This particular example of mine comes from the Washington Star, which had the egotism to call themselves simply "The Sunday Star", without bothering to cite their city.
Oddly enough, though the Star is digitized on newspapers.com, I can find not one word in their 1904 papers that mentions this postcard giveaway. That's oddly reminiscent of the Hearst cards, which seem to have been given little if any marketing boost in their papers.
Although these cards fail to credit an artist for the cartoons, this card (and probably all of them) uses an image created by B. Cory Kilvert, as proven when I stumbled upon an alternate version of the same cartoon in which the signature wasn't cut off. It offers a somewhat ghoulish gag, wherein a naturally fidgety kid is subjected to a prolonged period of sitting perfectly still so that a photographer can get his picture. The "death chair" was another term for the electric chair used for executions.
I'm no authority on photography history, but my impression is that the era of long slow exposures was well over by 1904. Am I wrong?
Labels: Wish You Were Here
The wet plate required the subject to stay still for about ten seconds. The idea of the old brace to hold one's head still is a holdover from much earlier days, say, the Deguerretype era in the mid 19th century, when one had to hold still for a full minute or two.
: 3/27/2023 2:32 PM : 3/27/2023 2:39 PM 