Another 1947 advertising card out of the St. Louis Public Service bus acquired in 2015. If you ever wonder why people preferred interurbans to buses, take a look at this and then recall that CA&E cars of the era were mostly filled with liquor and cigarette ads.
Frank,
ReplyDeleteThose car cards may be one of a kind survivors. they are worth keeping for later scanning and reprinting on card stock.
they are a great look back at an earlier time. I believe that it was IRM's Julie Johnson who reprinted a bunch of them for use at railway museums.
I think that memorial plaque in the car barn is a wonderful tribute. it is in my Rail & Wire that just arrived!
Ted Miles Who will renew shortly.
You know the problem with car cards, especially old ones like these? They were printed on cheap paperboard that becomes brittle, because they weren't meant to last very long. This wouldn't be so bad if they were stored somewhere; you can flat-scan or carrier-scan a brittle object, for example, to digitize it and print reproductions. But cards have to be bent to put them into a card rack, and they have to be bent to take them out. Almost always with super-brittle cards like this, they break, and often not into only two pieces. You can see that some of these are already breaking at the ends on their own. I am not looking forward to taking these out of the rack, and I'm thinking that the best way to save them may be to carefully cut them in two lengthwise. Any suggestions from someone who's actually dealt with horribly brittle cards in racks before? (Incidentally, there are only a few cards left in the racks in 3529. Most of the rest have broken apart and fallen out already. You're looking at what survived.)
ReplyDeleteR. W. Schauer
You might try a wallpaper steamer to soften the card before removal.
ReplyDelete-Hudson
High quality digital photos and software adjustments may be the best way to preserve them before taking them out. Probably most could be redesigned from scratch by a professional graphics person if a good photograph is available.
ReplyDeleteHudson- You've tried this? And the card doesn't fall apart? Most of these cards seem to be just dust that hasn't fallen apart yet.
ReplyDeleteChris- Photographing the cards in situ is a strong possibility, at least for a "security" copy. I have seen cards that have been re-made by a modern digital process, and to me they always stick out like a sore thumb. They're technically very good, and perhaps most people don't notice. But they just look too recent: clean, modern fonts, bright colors, digitization artifacts. Maybe the answer is to do it by hand the way the originals were.
R. W. Schauer
I have flattened old photos using a humidifier.
ReplyDeleteI would try it on a scrap piece for a test 1st.
It's paper, paper gets soft in high humidity.
What do you have to loose?
A ultrasonic humidifier and maybe a enclosure made out
of a garbage bag should also work.
-Hudson
It shouldn't be necessary to substitute new fonts for custom lettering since software can grab shapes and convert them to vector polygons. Fields of solid color can also be toned down and textured up a bit so the final product looks closer to what the historic printing process (presses?) would have produced.
ReplyDeleteBut the idea is to create an accurate as possible replica of something original that may be better off preserved in an archive than itself being in use, if the original physical object can be preserved at all.