Welcome to my little corner. I have been collecting picture postcards for thirty-one years, since I found a shoebox of them at my mother-in-law's after she passed: the cards she and my father-in-law had sent home from their honeymoon drive to California in 1948, and the cards their friends had sent them, all saved with the rubber band still on. I have never been able to throw one away since, and I have been buying other people's for almost as long.

My collection runs to about 2,600 cards, nearly all of them American, nearly all from the years between the Depression and the middle 1960s. That is the period of the linen card and the early chrome card, and if you don't know what those words mean yet, you will in a minute. I collect roadside America: motels, motor courts, diners, gas stations, tourist attractions, and (a separate weakness) state capitol buildings.

I don't have a scanner and I'm not sure I'd use one if I did — a postcard is a thing you hold. So on this page I describe the cards in words, the way I would if you were sitting at my dining room table with the albums open, which you are welcome to imagine.

Collectors divide American postcards into eras, and once you know them you can place almost any card within a few years just by looking at it.

• Private Mailing Cards, 1898-1901. In 1898 Congress let private printers make postcards that could go through the mail for a penny, and the back had to say "Private Mailing Card." You could not write a message on the back — only the address — so people wrote in the margins of the picture.
• Undivided backs, 1901-1907. The words "Post Card" were allowed on the back from the end of 1901, but the back was still address only.
• Divided backs, 1907 onward. In March 1907 the Post Office allowed a line down the middle: message on the left, address on the right. This started the great postcard craze; millions of the finest cards were printed in Germany until the First World War cut that off.
• White border cards, roughly 1915-1930. American printers, cheaper inks, and a white margin around the picture to save ink.
• Linen cards, 1930s to the early 1950s. My favorites. Printed on a card stock with a high rag content and a textured surface that looks and feels like linen cloth, which took bright, saturated inks beautifully. The colors were added by artists to black-and-white photographs, so a linen card is really a hand-tinted picture: the skies are impossible blues, the motel signs glow, the cars are always shiny and there is never any trash on the sidewalk. A Chicago printing company made an enormous share of them.
• Chrome cards, 1939 onward. "Chrome" is short for photochrome: real color photographs, printed glossy. The first ones appeared in 1939 (an oil company gave them away at its gas stations out West), and after the war they took over; by the middle 1950s the linen card was finished. Chrome cards are what a postcard rack looks like to this day.

Collectors call the hobby deltiology, which is a word I never say out loud.

Most of the cards I buy were never mailed, so there is no postmark. Turn it over anyway. The back tells you almost everything.

1. The stamp box. Linen cards usually say "Place One Cent Stamp Here." The postcard rate was a penny for most of the first half of the century, went to two cents on January 1, 1952, three cents in August 1958, four cents in January 1963, and five cents in January 1968. A card that says "Place 2c Stamp Here" was printed in the 1950s; a card that says 1c could be anywhere from the 1930s to 1951.
2. The publisher's number. The big Chicago printer that made most of my linens put a production number on the back, and once you know the trick it is a calendar: a digit, then a letter, then a dash and more letters and numbers. The letter is the decade (A for the 1930s, B for the 1940s, C for the 1950s, D for the 1960s) and the digit in front is the year within it. So a card marked 7B is from 1947, and 3C is 1953. I have that written on an index card in the front of every album.
3. The address. If the printed address on the back has a five-digit ZIP code, the card is from 1963 or later, because that is when ZIP codes began. If the state is spelled out or uses the old abbreviations ("Okla.", "Calif."), it's earlier. If the motel's phone number is printed as an exchange name and digits ("Phone: MAin 4-1212") you are looking at the 1950s or before.
4. The caption. "Air-conditioned," "steam heat," "tile showers," "free TV in every room," "Member: Quality Courts" — every phrase dates itself. Television in a motel card means 1950s. "Refrigerated air" means the Southwest.
5. The photo credit. Chrome cards often say the film the picture was taken on, and name the photographer. Linens never do.
6. The cars. Turn it back over. The cars parked in front of the motel are never newer than the card. A linen card with a 1941 sedan out front and a 1c stamp box is a 1940s card; if the same motel shows up on a chrome with tail fins, that's 1957 or after.

The heart of the collection, about 900 cards. Every motel on every highway in America had a postcard on the desk, free, so the guests would write home and do the advertising. I keep them in albums by state, and within the state by highway. Here are a few from the Route 66 albums, described as I would describe them to you.

I have a rule about motel cards: I try, when I'm out driving, to go and see whether the motel is still there. About one in four is. Usually the sign is what survived.

Restaurant cards are harder to find than motel cards, and the good ones show the inside — the counter, the stools, the pie case, and the same three waitresses in every card from every town in America.

• The Hi-Way Diner, Toledo, Ohio. Linen, 1941. A stainless-steel diner car with a clock on the roof and "BOOTHS FOR LADIES" lettered in the window. Interior view on a second card (I have both): a long counter, chrome stools, and a row of pies behind glass. Someone mailed the interior card to Detroit in 1942 and wrote "Ate here. Good pie. Love, Walt." Walt and I would have gotten along.
• Chicken in the Rough, various. This was a franchised chicken dinner sold in restaurants all over the country from the 1930s on, and every restaurant that served it had a card with the same cartoon rooster on it. I have eleven from eight states. Collectors go after the whole set; I just like the rooster.
• Stone cafes. Little rock-walled cafes along Route 66 in Oklahoma and Missouri put out cards showing themselves with a single gas pump out front. Two of mine show the same building ten years apart, and in the second one the gas pump is gone and there is a television antenna on the roof.
• Howard Johnson's. Real orange roof, real turquoise cupola, real weather vane. The 1950s chromes of these are so common that I only keep the ones somebody wrote something nice on.

I am trying to have a linen card of all forty-eight capitols that existed in the linen era (Alaska and Hawaii were territories then). I am at forty-three. Every drugstore in every capital city sold one, so they aren't rare, but I want one with a message on it, and that takes patience.

• Nebraska. The tower in Lincoln, finished in 1932, the one that looks like a skyscraper with a gold dome and a statue of a man sowing seed on top. On a linen card it glows like a lighthouse. The most modern-looking building in the whole album.
• Louisiana. The other skyscraper capitol, in Baton Rouge, from the same year, and the tallest capitol in the country. My linen card shows it with the gardens in front and a sky that was never that color over Baton Rouge.
• Texas. Pink granite, and a little taller than the Capitol in Washington, a fact the caption on the back does not let you forget.
• Wisconsin. The great white dome in Madison, on the isthmus between the lakes. My card was mailed in 1938 by a woman who wrote "We climbed clear to the top. My feet."
• Oregon. The 1938 building in Salem with the gold pioneer statue on top. A brand-new building when my card was printed, and the caption is very proud.
• Still needed: Delaware, Vermont, New Hampshire, Nevada and Rhode Island, with a message on the back. If you have one, let's talk.

You know these even if you don't know you do: GREETINGS FROM in script across the top, the name of the town or state in big block letters, and inside each letter a little picture of a local sight. They were made for nearly every state and hundreds of towns, mostly on linen, mostly in the '40s. They are the cards that everybody wants now, and the prices show it. I have all the states except Delaware and a few dozen towns. My favorite is a small Kansas town, where the sights inside the letters are the grain elevator, the courthouse, the high school, and a cow. That's the whole town and they were proud of every bit of it. So am I.

People ask, so here is an honest answer for 1999, with the warning that I am a collector and not a dealer, and prices at a show in Chicago are not prices at a flea market in Kansas.

• Ordinary chrome cards of the '50s and '60s: a dime to a quarter in the dealer's boxes, maybe a dollar for a good motel or a nice sign.
• Ordinary linen cards — a courthouse, a park, a Main Street: fifty cents to two dollars.
• Roadside linens — motels, diners, gas stations, especially on Route 66 and the other famous highways: a few dollars to ten or fifteen for a scarce one. These are what has gone up the most in the last few years, as more people my age get nostalgic and more people younger than me discover the old roads.
• Large-letter "Greetings from" cards: two to five dollars for a common state, more for a small town, because there were fewer printed.
• Real photo cards of the 1900s-1920s, and the good German-printed cards of the divided-back era, are a different world with a different price book, and I leave them to people who know.

What makes a card worth more: an interesting back (a message that tells a story, a clear postmark from a small town), a sign or a car in the picture, an unusual subject, and condition — sharp corners, no creases, no album marks. What makes it worth less: everything else. What makes it worth keeping has nothing to do with any of this.

• Postcard and paper shows. The best hunting. Dealers come with long boxes sorted by state and by subject, and you can go through a thousand cards in an afternoon. Bring a want list, a magnifier and a sack lunch. Most of my capitols came from shows.
• Antique malls. Almost every booth has a shoebox marked "Postcards 3 for $1." Go through the whole box. The dealers who don't collect postcards don't know what they've got.
• Flea markets and estate sales. This is where the albums turn up — someone's whole life of vacations in one book. I always buy the whole album. It seems wrong to split one up.
• Dealers by mail. A few dealers will send you a batch "on approval": you keep what you want, send back the rest with a check. I have a dealer in Missouri who knows my list and sends me an envelope every couple of months.
• The postcard club. Our club meets monthly at the library, and members trade before the program. I've traded my duplicates for some of my best cards.
• The computer. There are auctions now on the Internet where people sell postcards, and my nephew has found me two capitols that way. I am told it is the future. I will believe it when I can feel the linen through the screen.

Storage: keep them out of the sun, in sleeves or album pages made of polypropylene or polyester, never the soft vinyl pages from the '70s, which will ruin the inks over time. I lost a dozen good cards to those pages before I knew better. Shoeboxes are fine for the duplicates.

• From the September paper show: a linen of a motor court in Holbrook, Arizona with the Painted Desert behind it in colors that would embarrass a sunset, and an interior of a Missouri cafe with a jukebox at the end of the counter. Four dollars for the pair.
• From the antique mall, in the 3-for-$1 box: a 1949 Kansas "Greetings from" card I did not have, mailed from Salina, message: "Wheat's in. Coming Thursday."
• From my friends the Peabodys (see the ring below), who send me cards from every giant thing they visit: a brand-new chrome of a ball of twine. Not the 1950s, but the twine is, and I've started an album for the modern ones they send. They also brought me a 1950s linen of a motel in Tucumcari they found in a gift shop rack, still for sale at the original price.

• The Roadside Attraction Log — Dwayne and Rhonda, who go to the places on my cards.
• Neon Nights: Old Signs of the Mother Road — the signs, today.
• Hank & Peggy's Great American Road Trip
• Concert Ticket Stubs: 1978-1999 — another paper collector on the ring.
• The Board Game Closet — Walt runs the Hobby Horse ring and collects old games, which have wonderful printed boxes.
• The Route66 neighborhood