While there are countless books for collectors of postcards, and many books illustrated by postcards, Jeffrey Meikle's study of the industry through Curt Teich & Co. is innovative and significant. Postcard America focuses not on the “chrome” postcard, the high-gloss picture postcards that one can still purchase at souvenir shops today, but on their predecessors, linen postcards. Linen postcards were black-and-white photographs that were retouched and colorized, printed via offset lithography onto postcard paper with a textured surface that resembled linen. Known for their vivid colors—often including seemingly apocalyptic sunsets—linen postcards dominated the market when they were released in 1931 and remained a mainstay through the early 1950s. The originator of these postcards was Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, which published about half of the estimated hundred thousand different linen postcard designs; in total, Teich and his competitors sold nearly a billion individual linen postcards.

German-born Curt Teich (1877–1974) learned the printing trade in order to work in his family's print shop business. He immigrated to the United States in 1895 and had set up a print shop in Chicago by 1898, the year that Congress set the postage rate at one penny for privately printed postcards. Teich imported his earliest postcards from Germany, where the printers were both highly skilled and affordable, and began printing his own postcards soon after. His earliest creations utilized collotype printing, a photomechanical process that allowed for rich tonal gradation. By 1904 he had transitioned to combining collotype or halftone prints with lithography to add colored tints. In 1910, Teich adopted offset lithograph printing, which allowed for much faster printing with less wear on the printing plates. Teich refined and improved his process, still a combination of halftone and lithography, in order to improve speed and reduce costs, becoming what was described at the time as the General Motors of the postcard industry (p. 32). Finally, in 1931, Teich introduced the process he dubbed “C.T. Art-Colortone.” With this process, Teich produced the linen postcard for which he came to be known, with its bright colors and its images scrubbed clean of detritus and power lines—but often with extra American flags added.

The Teich archive survives intact at the Lake County (Illinois) Discovery Museum and includes not only samples of the company's postcards, but also records of those designs’ retouching and approval by the shop or historical site that commissioned them. Meikle has also used sales correspondence preserved by descendants of G. I. Pitchford, the California-based western United States sales representative. It was through these materials that Meikle was able to reassemble, for the first time, the part of the postcard process most relevant to the business historian: the steps of finding a client and producing the postcard. Sales agents engaged in selling racks of postcards to druggists, five-and-dimes, and stationers, but spent the majority of their time attempting to persuade individual proprietors to commission postcards of their businesses. Meikle describes the agent, in this role, as “a kind of middleman in production and distribution.” Sales agents sourced the photographs for postcards, sometimes even acting as the photographer themselves, and recorded information about appropriate colors for the Teich art department. From this point, Meikle notes, “about three hundred employees saw [the order] through to completion” (p. 50). Meikle describes the steps of airbrushing, color proofing, approvals or adjustments, and printing methods, all necessary for the creation of a new postcard. Astonishingly, the Teich business model involved losing money on new postcards, only recouping losses when clients ordered reprints.

A significant portion of Meikle's book presents two linen postcard “portfolios”: one of landscapes and one of cityscapes. In both, Meikle has loosely subcategorized the topics and presents a single postcard image opposite a page-long description of that postcard. These texts tend toward visual analyses and histories of the sites pictured, but include any notes from Teich's files relevant to the image. In a final section, Meikle attempts to address the most nebulous topic: why someone would have been compelled to buy, send, and, especially, keep and preserve a postcard. While Meikle's arguments are interesting, one cannot avoid being speculative with this topic. In his own writing, the author describes several series of inscribed postcards from the same sender, preserved together, and ruminates on the sender, the recipient, and their lives. Yet he also acknowledges the difficulty in doing this: “True knowledge eludes the collector, who is left constructing a narrative that might make sense in terms of the fictional conventions of books and movies but offers little in the way of knowledge and understanding” (p. 462). The portfolios and the final chapter may have less direct influence on business historians, but are significant in developing a core understanding of the artistic, representative, and cultural role of the postcard. After all, although the salesman ensured that postcards of endless subjects were sold in every town, the consumer bought, sent, and collected these objects, propelling them to ubiquity.

Meikle's study of the industry through Curt Teich & Co. gives a new perspective on this field. His description of the postcards’ production makes these complicated processes immensely understandable, and his treatment of their sales and distribution is thoughtfully presented. Meikle is limited only by the gaps in the Teich archive; for example, only one year of actual sales data survives. As such, and perhaps also owing to Meikle's career-long interest in design and cultural history, there is a strong focus on visual history. Still, a historian with an interest in sales, photography, or visual culture will find plenty here. The book covers different ground than Elspeth Brown's The Corporate Eye (2008) or work on modern print culture, including Barry Shank's A Token of My Affection (2004). Postcard America is a major step toward filling the gaps in studies of businesses that produced visual material.