Last week we went through a quick update on the large number of postcards new to my inventory concerned with dogs and their bladder relief. Today we will revisit another topic we have considered before: the ever-popular fishing postcard.
Sending a postcard JUST because you are on vacation is a phenomenon f only the last sixty years or thereabouts. But the basic custom of sending people word to say how your time off was progressing was established early on. AND if that respite from labor involved a fishing trip…. So there are several postcards featuring Victorian and Edwardian men, often in a summer straw hat, trying their luck.
No one was better with a fishing postcard than Teich artist Ray Walters. His fishermen are very much of a type, but he shows his artistry (and love of fishing?) in is glorious, glorious fish, which appeared only in the dreams (or nightmares) of the dedicated angler.
What with one thing and another, I’ve never seen a postcard where the omnipresent icons of 1910s postcards, the Dutch kids went fishing. But they were ahead of their time, as usual, with an early postcard sneering at such tiny fish as could be had these days. (No, I haven’t had a bunch of the Dutch lids arrive in inventory, so we will not be revisiting them in this series of updates. This could change without notice, if you are weeping on your screen.)
If I didn’t expect to see the Dutch kids here, I also didn’t expect to find one of the inspirations for a major fishing movie in postcard form.
As always, we have the philosophers of fishing, who reflect on how the sport reflects the rest of life. Romance, as they would no doubt point out, has many angles.
And in romance as in fishing, either sex can be the hooked (or the hooker.)
The mishaps of fishing are the most popular theme of fishing postcards. Did I mention Ray Walters and his glorious, fearsome fish?
Not catching fish is a perennial topic, and the caption here is an equally perennial complaint of fisherman on their short break from the workaday world. THIS example also repeats the theme of the really dedicated fisherman, who is so intent on catching fish, he doesn’t even notice what the vacationing fish has come here to see.
This card concentrates on one theme only: that it IS possible to have a miserable time fishing.
Of course, if you want to discuss miserable days, you can look over this card, which features a man who wasn’t even going fishing, but caught some anyway. (You DO see his trunks are hanging on that branch, right? Anyone who asks what he was using for bait has to stay after class and untangle fishline.)
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