However he had started way back in 1904 and his subject matter was much wider than most people give him credit for. In those 60 years of creativity he tackled pretty much every social situation going and his cards can give a fascinating insight into fashions, politics and morals as they changed over the course of that time.
It's estimated that he may have illustrated over 12000 postcards in the course of his career. Nobody is exactly certain of the number because there are many that he didn't sign for one reason or another and he could draw in many different styles which makes attributing some early cards to him especially difficult as they were often unsigned.
For the collector this is quite a challenge!
This challenge is made even harder because:
- some cards have the same picture but different captions.
- some popular cards were redrawn but the same series number was used, and it can be so easy to overlook these, not realising the picture is actually different (albeit only slightly!).
- some cards were published by different publishers although they are otherwise identical.
- some of those printed immediately after World War Two had to be done with poor quality paper and ink due to rationing, making them look very different to the properly printed version
- then there are the foreign language versions which have captions that are different to the original English ones ...
It's a confusing world ....
I'd not been collecting his cards very long before I began to realise that it wasn't just a case of trying to collect number 1 to number whatever.
In this blog I'll be posting some of the confusing items I've come across ... as well as some of the interesting and intriguing ones.
I hope this will be of help to other collectors ... and hopefully lead to less confusion!
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