The Collection Collection Volume 1: Sunday School Postcards

We Missed You Last Sunday

Welcome to the first of many future volumes of The Collection Collection. The intent of this series is to showcase a smaller collection within my larger collection of postcards, matchcovers, QSL cards, found photos or ephemera.
I will provide at least a dozen examples of the item and provide a brief history of what I know about the items. Let’s get started by being absent to Sunday School.

Oh, you forgot to go to Sunday School? These postcards were ordered and sent by the local church to the family of the absent student to not-so subtly remind them to COME TO SUNDAY SCHOOL.

Sometime the messaging wasn’t passive-agressive so much as it was agressive-agressive.

The message on this postcard, mailed from Toledo, Ohio to Franklin Reed in Toledo, Ohio on January 26, 1941 says:

Sunday P.M. January 26th Dear Franklin: I was disappointed at not seeing you in your class this morning at Sunday School. Hope you are not sick and will be with us again next Sunday. Faithfully yours, the S.S. sec. of First Missionary Church, A.H. Horton

Many of these cards were printed by The Standard Publishing Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company which exists to this day was formed in 1892 and is a major provider of Sunday School lessons, hymns, bibles, postcards and all other types of church supplies. You can still order cards like these. These cards have been around since the first postcard craze in the first decade of the 1900s. The earliest one in my collectio, produced by Standard Publishing, is from 1911. A few other companies, A-C Press, Abingdon, and CRG also produced cards over the years.

I have more than two hundred of these cards. I may share more later. For the time being this dozen will have to do.

If you have any questions, comments, corrections or hymns please let me know at cardboardamerica@gmail.com or on Twitter @73sand88s.

Volume 2 will be coming soon. We’ll be expecting you next week!