FIELD NOTES Great Lakes Postcard Set 5-Pack

This set of five postcards, one each for Lakes Michigan, Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, was created as a tribute to Curt Teich & Co., the firm that revolutionized the postcard industry in the 1930s with their dreamy, photographic, hand-retouched “Art-Colortone” linen cards. They’re all ready for a stamp and a few witty lines to bring a little old-school joy to the mailboxes of your friends and family.

We set out to produce this set of five cards in a manner true to the way they were originally created. That began with a 1,300-mile road trip to shoot black-and-white film photographs of each of the lakes, like a Teich Co. traveling salesman. 

After developing the film with expired Kodak D-76 in a canister in the sink, things got a bit more modern. We scanned the negatives and, having examined the original Teich production files, felt no qualms whatsoever about retouching and coloring the photos beyond recognition. We used the same palette of colors Teich supplied their colorists. 

After a consultation on the golden borders that stumped Dr. Meikle himself, we printed the cards on Neenah’s “Avon Brilliant White” linen cover stock.

SPECIFICATIONS:

• 01. Proudly printed by the good people of Active Graphics, Cicero, Ill.
• 02. Front: Neenah Classic Linen 100#C “Avon White” with a 5-color application of process-color plus “Teich Gold” soy-based Toyo UV inks.
• 03. Back: Neenah Classic Linen 100#C “Avon White” with a thick, brute force, 1-color application of “Teich Navy” soy-based Toyo UV ink.
• 04. Printed on a Komori Lithrone S40 40" 6-color offset printing press.
• 05. Post Card dimensions are 5-1/2" × 3-1/2" (140mm × 89mm).
• 06. FIELD NOTES uses only the Futura typeface family (Paul Renner, 1927) in its materials. Though you can see we snuck a little Memphis (Rudolf Wolf, 1929) into this product for historical accuracy.
• 07. All FIELD NOTES paper products are printed and manufactured in the U.S.A.
• 08. UPC: 850032279130