Picturing Berkeley A Postcard History

Foreword It is difficult to imagine today just how popular postcards were at the beginning of the twentieth century. Priced at a penny each, the picture postcard was bright, attractive, and an easy form of communication. A postcard sent in the morning mail could arrive that same day in the afternoon mail delivery. By 1908, every town in American large enough to have a Main Street was pictured in postcards. That year, 677 million postcards were mailed in the United States, yet the population was only 88 million! In Berkeley, however, there was more to photograph than its main street, Shattuck Avenue. The new University, the first in the West, was a great tourist attraction. The postcard possibilities were almost unlimited. When the Greek Theater opened in 1903, it was difficult to keep up with the demand for scens of the new amphitheater.... When Ken Cardwell and I first decided to do a book on Berkeley postcards, we envisioned a small, simple book highlighting perhaps a hundred cards from the Berkeley Historical Society collection. The project became larger and grander when Sarah Wikander enthusiastically offered to let us use her collection of 1,600 Berkeley postcards. For the first time we saw many new scenes from Berkeley's past, and we knew then that we had a treasure to share and document.Willes, Burl is the author of 'Picturing Berkeley A Postcard History', published 2005 under ISBN 9781586854683 and ISBN 1586854682.