The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection

This lavishly illustrated volume is a treat for the senses, exploring the golden age of postcards, the period around 1903 to 1918 when modernity was born and postcards became the new form of mass communication. The new artistic medium serves as a thorough visual record of the era. Drawing from the immense personal collection of Leonard A. Lauder, in conjunction with an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, this book serves as both reference and history, with short chapter introductions by Klich, an art historian, and Weiss, a Museum of Fine Arts curator, offering social and historical context. Everything from advertising to beautiful women, travel, WWI, fashion, and social commentary is represented, in full-color reproductions that showcase the dazzling variety and creativity of the period. It's easy to see how, for a time, postcards captured the world's attention, riding the wave of change and early globalization, As the authors state, postcards "provide unusually vivid access to the past," its concerns and obsessions. Gorgeously and meticulously presented, this is more than a bit of nostalgia%E2%80%94it's a beautiful, complex record of a time gone by. (Oct.)