Greetings from the Shores

Making “The Great Lakes” Postcards

Like many Field Notes releases, “The Great Lakes” Edition required extensive research, both for the text and the visuals. While searching for vintage Great Lakes ephemera on eBay, Jim came across a few similar colorful postcards printed on linen cardstock. A bit of Googling revealed these collectible “Art-Colortone” cards, produced by Curt Teich and Co., were a goldmine of American history, told with ink and paper… just the sort of thing we get excited about.

By this point, “The Great Lakes” edition itself was well underway, and there was no obvious way to incorporate the Teich aesthetic into the Memo Book design. But these postcards were impossible to ignore, especially once we dug into Jeffrey L. Meikle’s wonderful Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation 1931-1950. When we learned that Teich was based here in Chicago, and that the Newberry Library, also just a couple miles from our office, hosted the full collection of every postcard Teich ever produced AND the company’s complete records and production files, there was absolutely no way we could walk away from them.

Aaron suggested a series of cards as a subscriber bonus, and joked that it would be funny to feature nearly-identical photos of each lake from indistinguishable locations. It seemed so “Field Notes” to expend an immense amount of money, time, and effort to send me across the Midwest to shoot five photographs that I could have captured ten minutes from the office. It’d also be a good subject for our film, so Steve (and his camera) could come along, too. We had a plan: to create a typology of the Great Lakes through a series of vintage-inspired postcards.

Note: The Postcard Sets are included in subscriber shipments of the “Great Lakes” Edition as a free gift. They’re also available for sale.

Doing Our Homework

Curt Teich was an innovator, to say the least. His family contacts in the German printing industry helped him pioneer and master four-color offset printing while it was in its infancy. He imported skilled photo retouchers and colorists from Germany, supplementing them with recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After years of development, the Art-Colortone process was perfected around 1930.

Reading Meikle’s book, I was delighted to find not only a great visual resource, but also a ridiculously detailed description of the process, people, and technology involved. I’m obsessed with what I’ve started calling “forensic design;” looking at not only the finished piece for inspiration but also the technology, people, history, and culture behind it. In this case, Meikle had done all the work for me. It seemed that he’d written the book specifically for me, in anticipation of this project.

I was excited to be so well-prepared, and I hadn’t even visited the Newberry yet! I reached out to our friend Jen Farrell of Starshaped Press, who works with the Newberry often, and she put me in touch with Jill Gage, “Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing,” (not a bad job title!). Jill, along with Alison Hinderliter and Will Hansen, were excited to hear about our plans, and sent me all sorts of additional resources leading up to my visit.

When I arrived, a large cart filled with archival boxes and albums awaited me, each filled with hundreds of Teich postcards, only a small fraction of the collection. The boxes of production records featured a folder for each postcard, featuring the original order form, original and retouched photographic prints, and other references, such as fabric swatches and handwritten notes. Reading the forms was entertaining, some were marked “very particular customer!,” and the extensive revisions attached validated this warning.

Seeing the retouched photos was enlightening, in some cases the surface of the photo print was barely visible under all the brushwork. Software like Adobe Photoshop is often criticized for its ability to alter reality, but many of its tools were available in analog form in the early Twentieth Century, they just required more specialized tools and skills.

On The Road Again

Over the years, Steve and I had our fair share of grueling journeys and equipment load-outs, so a one-way red-eye flight to Buffalo, N.Y., followed by a three-day 1300 mile drive seemed practically relaxing.

After a few hours’ sleep in Buffalo, we headed north to the southwestern edge of Lake Ontario, just east of the Niagara River. I brought along my trusty seventies Canon AE-1, and a couple rolls of my favorite cheap-o Czech film, never mind that Kodak was just a short drive to the east of us in Rochester. I also brought a modern DSLR, to be safe. We captured the first of our images at Fort Niagara State Park, a grassy shore with Toronto just visible on the horizon.

A route through Canada would have knocked hundreds of miles off the drive, but one of us (it was me) hadn’t bothered to renew his passport. After a brief detour to Niagara Falls, we followed the Niagara River back towards Buffalo, then on to Erie, Pennsylvania. We stopped at Presque Isle State Park and found a shady picnic area at “Beach 8” for our second photo. The sky was pretty blah the whole day. Timing our shoots at sunset or sunrise would have made for more dramatic color and lighting, but we were shooting black and white, and we knew the retouchers and colorists (me) would fix that for us later. By mid-afternoon we were deep into Ohio, and stopped in Port Clinton (west of Sandusky) to grab another shot of Lake Erie, but in the end, the Presque Isle shot was the winner. We arrived in Ann Arbor. Michigan around dark, with time for a relaxing dinner and a couple drinks, knowing we had another long day ahead of us.

Rather than crossing Michigan’s “thumb,” in the morning, we drove straight north to Saginaw Bay, and shot the Huron photo amidst flocks of sandpipers at Bay City State Park. Following the coastline would have added an extra couple hours to the drive, and we felt good about the photos, so we made a beeline up the interstate to hit Mackinaw City in time for lunch. We crossed the majestic Mackinac Bridge to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with Lake Michigan to our left and Huron still to our right. We briefly stopped in St. Ignace for a backup Huron photo, but Mackinac Island blocked the view of the horizon. Even though we knew we’d spend the whole next day along the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, the weather was looking a little iffy, so we decided to shoot Lake Michigan while we could.

Michigan Route 2 follows the north shore of Lake Michigan for about thirty miles, so we had several of opportunities to pull over and shoot. The first, near Moran, looked promising: a sandy beach with a wide-open view. As I started to shoot, small sand flies started to buzz around me, and I came to the realization that the black “sediment” all over the beach was actually millions of tiny insects, all of which agreed at that exact moment to take flight, towards us. We ran, screaming, to the car, slammed the doors and spend the next few minutes swatting at the dozens of bugs that made it into the car with us. Luckily, they didn’t seem to bite but the sheer quantity was terrifying. As we resumed our drive west, I saw a blurry spot ahead. At first I thought I had a bug in my eye, but the spot got bigger and bigger, and we suddenly realized it was a dense cloud of sand flies, bigger than the car. For the next few minutes, we drove through cloud after cloud of sand flies. Shooting Lake Michigan could wait.

Eventually, the sky cleared and we dared to make another stop, right before Route 2 cut inland. Naubinway is the northernmost point of Lake Michigan, with a small beach just east of town. We found a small cove with some attractively-spaced rocks just off the shore. A seagull patiently waited on the biggest rock for me to get a few photos, having no idea that I’d mask her out later. Four lakes down, one to go!

We crossed the U.P to Munising on Lake Superior, where we were staying the night. Worried about the weather and long drive the next day, we set out to catch Superior before sunset. Munising’s view of the lake is blocked by Grand Island, so we cut west a bit, to Au Train, and found a lovely public beach for our last photo. We got back into town, visited a brewpub, and talking to the bartender, realized we’d beat the Memorial Day rush by just a couple days. By the end of the week, all the quiet roads, towns, and beaches we’d visited on our trip would be packed with tourists.

Our weather fears were justified the next morning. It bounced between drizzle and storms the entire day. Lake Michigan was to our left all day, but we didn’t even make another attempt. By the time we got to Chicago, tornado sirens were blaring.

Fix It in Post

Back in Chicago, I half-assedly developed the photos with Kodak D-76 I mixed up 18 months ago (It wasn’t like we drove 1300 miles to get these photos!). Surprisingly they came out fine. I scanned the negatives and got to work retouching them beyond recognition, just like the Teich retouchers would have done. In most cases I dropped in prettier skies and beefed up the contrast, lightening the midtones in anticipation of color. Then I ‘brushed’ in (with a tablet and stylus) the colors, using Teich’s colorists’ palette for reference, both for historical accuracy and to give all six cards a consistent pallette.

Over the course of the research, I noticed many cards had a colored border, ranging from off-white to golden yellow or peach. At first I suspected it was some sort of varnish that had discolored, but examining it with a loupe, it appeared to be a fifth spot color, and it was not applied to the entire surface of the card, as there were lighter whites within the main artwork (note the “Henderson Harbor” example above). The Newberry doesn’t have any full press sheets in their archives, so I was unsure if it was a color applied to the full sheet and maybe varied run-to-run, or if it varied on individual postcards within a run. I reached out to Dr. Meikle, telling him about the project and asking him if he had any idea about the borders. He sounded a little disappointed that he didn’t have an answer, but I reassured him that his book couldn’t have been more helpful. In the end, I decided to give all five cards a consistent spot-color golden-yellow border, sort of an average tint of the many variations I’d seen.

A sidenote: Upon finally seeing our finished cards, Dr. Meikle, who lives in Texas, wrote back to let us know that the Au Train beach we featured on the Lake Superior postcard was the very same beach he’s been visiting for years and years with his family, they were gearing up for their annual trip just as he first saw the finished postcards.

Paying It Backward

It’s obviously a top priority for us to make products our customers will like, and we’re always trying to entertain ourselves as well. That said, with a project like this, it’s always important to me to “do justice” to our influences and references. Anyone can superficially imitate the look of a vintage piece of ephemera, but I’d like to think we do much more than that. We might not always do things precisely the same way they were done in the past (in some cases it’s too expensive, or time consuming, or the technology no longer exists at all!) but understanding how and why such pieces were printed in the first place, and making their story part of our story, we’re hopefully doing better than simple imitation.

Learning everything we can about the conception, design, production, and distribution of objects like this enriches our understanding of what came before, and becomes part of our role in the history of design and printing. A project like this would be impossible without Dr. Meikle’s research, and the Newberry Library’s vast collection and assistance, so thanks again, we’re so appreciative to have such great resources.

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Check out our “Art Colortone” Postcard Sets and, of course, the “Great Lakes” Edition 5-Pack of Memo Books, or better yet, start a year-long subscription and get them both, our next three seasonal releases, and lots of other benefits too.