Era guide · 1930–1945
Linen era
Run a finger across the card. That woven, cloth-like texture — unmistakable once you’ve felt it — is linen-finish stock, introduced around 1930, with high rag content that took ink in vivid, saturated, almost dreamlike color. The style’s defining product was C.T. Art Colortone, from Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, the largest postcard printer in the world.
Linen cards are the best-documented cards in American history, because Teich’s production numbers encode their year outright. A number like 6BH2667 reads 1946, Art Colortone — our decoder does it for you, from the Curt Teich Archives’ own dating tables. If your linen card carries a Teich number, you can do better than an era: you can have the year.
The era’s edge is soft: linen stock lingered on some lines into the early 1950s even as glossy photochrome cards took over, so treat 1945 as the center of the transition rather than a wall.
