Rialto Bridge, Venice, c.1900
This image, unlike the others, has been tone-corrected

Oldest (pre-1906) cards Vertical cards A-G horizontal cards H-P horizontal cards Q-Z horizontal cards Post-1905 cards Vertical cards A-G horizontal cards H-P horizontal cards Q-Z horizontal cards It appears that many of the oldest cards were bought as memorabilia, because they were never mailed. The quality of these virgins is, of course, superior to that of postcards that have been abused by post offices around the world. I own the copyright to the scan interpretations, which have been as literal as I can make them. I hereby place my scan interpretations in the public domain. However, if you make any use of my scan intrepretations, you remain responsible for securing any necessary permissions from the original copyright holders. I make no warranties as to the copyright status of any of these images. If you make use of these scan interpretations, I would appreciate, but do not require, a citation of the source. I myself am treating the "oldest" cards as out-of-copyright. As far as I am aware, none of these images carries a copyright notice, and all were printed before 1906, until which year international postal treaties required full-width address lines. Publishers instantly adopted half-width address lines because of their usefulness when posting a message home and the resultant popularity with the general public. Previously, the only permitted space for a message had been the face of the card, and you will sometimes see messages written on the faces of the oldest cards. The post-1905 cards will not be used in Carfree Cities without an attempt to locate any possible copyright holder. (This posting constitutes such an attempt. If you are the copyright holder of any of these images, please send e-mail.) I have not retouched any of these scans. A few show moiree because they were printed with a dot raster, something that was unusual in postcard printing of that time, when the excellent gravue process was used to print nearly all cards. The use of stochastic halftones (such as those produced by the gravure process) is just now being reintroduced to printing, and its return heralds better photographic reproduction. Scans printed using stochastic (also known as "FM") halftoning would be free of moiree, just as almost all of these postcard scans are.

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