8 Vintage Alfred Mainzer Flower Postcards

I have some very beautiful vintage collectible postcards that I would like to share. I found them in a drawer in my mother's house. She was an avid yard sale and church white elephant sale shopper.

Although Alfred Mainzer, Inc. was located in Long Island City, New York, all of their vintage floral postcards were printed in Belgium.

You would probably recognize their vintage dressed cat postcards. There was a series of cards with cats, kittens, and some dogs dressed as humans doing day-to-day human tasks. (Animals dressed in clothing, performing human tasks, are known as anthropomorphic.) However, Mainzer produced many different postcard designs.

The company is still in business today and makes greeting cards.

Here are two different flower postcards, both entitled Anemones. The one on the left is numbered "427" and the one on the right is numbered "442."

This is a very nice group of forget-me-nots. It has a really old world feel to the design, colors and background. The forget-me-nots, as are violets, are a favorite theme in the Victorian era. Many a Victorian card, particularly for Valentine's Day, were decorated with forget-me-nots

The card on the left is labeled Field Flowers (#415) and the one on the right is titled Fieldflowers (#403)

To me, the one on the right appears to be field flowers collected in the fall while the one on the left appears to depict flowers collected during spring. Interesting, today we would probably call these "wildflowers." I wonder if this was the terminology used for wildflowers back then or if it is just the way the company chose to label them.

This postcard is a lot more vibrant than the rest. However, it still has a vintage look to it. It is number 410. Some of his other designs seem more appropriately named "daisies" than this one—although these are shasta daisies.

The Carnation Alpine Ox-Eye postcard has a darker background than some of the others. There is more contrast, but it does make the flowers stand out. This is number 418.

Maybe some of these remind you of the flowers in your garden or a bouquet you received.

One way to determine approximately when a postcard was published is to look at the manufacturer's address on the back. For United States addresses, one or two-digit zone numbers were introduced for large cities in 1943 and remained in effect until 1963. In 1963, the five-digit ZIP code was introduced across the US.

As this card has a zone number, we know it was produced between 1943 and 1964. The absence of a zone code could mean it was produced before 1943 or the printer's address was not in a large city.

The back shown is the same for all of the flower postcards shown in this article. The only difference between them is the flower title and number. Another way to tell is if the postage amount is listed in the stamp area. Some have the cost of postage printed on them. If you look at this list you can get a good idea of what it cost to mail a postcard in a particular year.

Chicago Postcard Museum - History of Postcard Rates