I Am Lucky to Have These

Here are two more exaggerated food concept cards. The first one shows a giant potato. The wording tells us that it is "the atmosphere here" that is responsible for the size of the potato, wherever here is - you get to guess, or see on the other side from where the post card was mailed. The bottom one shows two giant onions from wherever... you get to fill in the blank, although there is no line to write on like on the EH Mitchell cards. I am not as excited about the pictures on the fronts of these two cards as I am about what I found on the backs.

The top post card is very ornate and attractive. I wondered which company would draw attention to themselves like that. There is no company name on the card - front or back. I was very disappointed and thought that there is no use in blogging about this post card; there isn't much to say. All I could think about was that I have two copies of that card - one slightly larger than the other. Nothing exciting.

I continued on through Volume 4 of my collection (where the exaggerated pictures post cards are kept). I noticed that the back of the post card with the onions looked familiar. I went back to the potato post card and "Voila!" it had the same "scrolly", fancy design on the back.

It also had some identifying marks at the bottom!! The first mark was this owl and art supplies. I found nothing that corresponded. I greatly depend on the website: http://www.metropostcard.com/metropcpublishers.html for historical information about printers and publishers of post cards. They have done a lot of work and deserve even more credit for that work. There was nothing with the owl logo or Gold Medal Art on their website. So I decided to look at the next indicator on the post card:

I looked up to see if Mr. Google could find a certain J. Herman from 1912. Again, nothing; this includes a search through the Metro website.
The next clue was at the bottom of the line that makes this a divided back era post card:

For this logo I went straight to the Metropolitan website and searched under "M" because that top item looked like a fancy M. This could be interpreted as "MPCo". Scrolling down the Ms I found it!! This is the logo of the Midland Publishing Company from New York City, New York. Here is the description from the website: "A publisher of holiday and greeting cards. Most of their cards were printed in the United States by the Gold Medal Art Company, whose distinctive owl logo appears on the back. Their designs were very simple and often uninspired."

I am luck to have these (I have a total of eight of them) post cards in my collection because the company was only in business from 1912 to 1914.