Books for the Postcard Stocking Stuffers in Your Life

Vintage and antique postcards are delightful messages from the past to enjoy in the present. They feature iconic hotels, scenic wonders, lost fashions, covered bridges, main streets of yore, and places from Maine to Monterrey. Each of our postcard packs features 15 different postcards, and you can choose from over 400 American locations and themes. The perfect size to tuck in a stocking, a gift bag, or just send through the mail, they are sure to please any collector or lover of history.

8 products

Sort

Statue of Liberty, The

$7.99

Hudson River Lighthouses

$7.99

The Statue of Liberty

$7.99

Wave-Swept Lighthouses of New England

$7.99

Beach Haven

$7.99

Cape St. George Lighthouse and Apalachicola Bay

Hudson River Lighthouses

9781467103657

$7.99

The Hudson River's unique navigational icons are celebrated in this collection of mailable vintage-photograph postcards. Set against the backdrop of purple mountains, lush hillsides, and tidal wetlands, the lighthouses of the Hudson River were built between 1826 and 1921 to improve navigational safety on a river teeming with freight and passenger traffic. Unlike the towering beacons of the seacoasts, these river lighthouses were architecturally diverse, ranging from short conical towers to elaborate Victorian houses. Operated by men and women who at times risked and lost their lives in service of safe navigation, these beacons have overseen more than a century of extraordinary technological and social change. Of the dozens of historic lighthouses and beacons that once dotted the Hudson River, just eight remain, including the iconic Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor's great monument to freedom and immigration, which served as an official lighthouse between 1886 and 1902.

Wave-Swept Lighthouses of New England

9781467129350

$7.99

In the United States, the earliest attempts to build wave-swept lighthouses in the 1830s led to several masterpieces of engineering, a few of which are in the New England region. This collection of mailable vintage-photograph postcards focuses on Whaleback (Maine), Saddleback Ledge (Maine), Minot's Ledge (Massachusetts), Halfway Rock (Maine), Graves Ledge (Massachusetts), and Ram Island Ledge (Maine). All of these wave-swept lighthouses stand in rugged testimony to the people who designed and built them, and they also serve to remind us of the struggles and sacrifices of the lighthouse keepers who kept a good light for so many years before automation.

Beach Haven

9781467129367

$7.99

This collection of mailable vintage-photograph postcards celebrates Beach Haven, founded in 1874 and designed as one of the first summer seashore resorts in New Jersey for wealthy Philadelphians. Beach Haven's boardwalk extended from Seventh Street to Holyoke Avenue, one and a quarter miles long. Wool bathing costumes were the rage: women fanny dunked while men and children swam in the Atlantic. An 1883 Philadelphia Inquirer advertisement stated that the hotel opened for the season with thorough sanitary arrangements. A steamboat, connected with the Tuckerton Railroad, carried many visitors to the island. Robert Barclay Engle, with financial help from his cousin Samuel Engle, built the Engleside Hotel with materials barged across Little Egg Harbor Bay from the mainland by wide catboats, and the majestic hotel opened in 1876. It had room to accommodate 350 guests and offered numerous amenities, such as running fresh and salt water, tennis courts, and fresh milk.

Cape St. George Lighthouse and Apalachicola Bay

9781467126311

$7.99

The beacon of the historic Cape St. George Lighthouse still guides mariners into Apalachicola Bay more than 150 years after it was built.

Founded in 1831, the town of Apalachicola took its name from Creek Indians, to whom it signified a land of friendly people. Sheltered from the Gulf of Mexico by a string of barrier islands, the port flourished as the only site in Florida on a river that is navigable for over 300 miles to the fall line at Columbus, Georgia, Apalachicola's sister city. Generations of lighthouse keepers were bound to St. George Island and its great bay by an intense sense of duty to sustain seagoing commerce and a love for a place where they could raise their families in freedom. When the foundation washed away in 2005 after a very active hurricane season and a final surge from Hurricane Wilma, residents took action to salvage and rebuild the historic lighthouse. Visitors may still climb the lighthouse tower, surrounded by bricks that were first laid in 1852. Enjoy the rich history of the Cape St. George Lighthouse in this collection of 15 historic black-and-white postcards.