• Holidays: Winsch Halloween Postcards

Winsch Halloween Postcards
By Susan Brown Nicholson (published with permission)
Originally Published: October 2007

Halloween postcards seem to be a very stable commodity in the postcard world. For the last 30 years, the price has grown from a couple of dollars a card to $1,500 for some. While the prices for individual cards may fluctuate from time to time, there has never been a drastic drop, a true blue chip of the industry. Why might this be?

Halloween seems to be a holiday that all adults relate to, having had it play some part in their lives as children. The attraction of the holiday is the fun of costumes, candy and being allowed to run free and be a bit naughty without fear of punishment. It is the one time of the year that children are free to run wildly through neighborhoods after dark. Pure excitement abounds everywhere from school parties to parades to crazy fun with friends.



Most Halloween postcards are extremely colorful and well done. The history portrayed on the cards relates to the past importance of when the holiday was a major step in courtship which would lead to a successful marriage, maybe as soon as spring. Many Halloween traditions relate to women trying to determine who their true love may be. One Halloween card features a couple hanging as ornaments on a Christmas tree with the verse, “your face I've seen on Halloween, will you be my little queen?" This reaffirms the importance of Halloween as a source of finding a spouse.

Because the postcards were produced for the American market, the number is more limited than holidays that were celebrated around the world. By collectors counts, the total number of images produced for Halloween, excluding any real photo postcards is about 3,500 images. Recently, European collectors have become excited over Halloween postcards and are becoming a major buying force in this topic on eBay.

Publisher John O. Winsch of Stapleton, N.Y., is the publisher of choice for high quality, steadily increasing values and great design. The Winsch postcards designed by Samuel L. Schmucker have always been on the list of must haves.

The John Winsch company was only in business a short time, starting in 1910, peaking in 1911 and ceasing production of cards in 1915. However, there are some Winsch cards with copyright dates into the 20s.



Winsch, like many publishers of the time, would hire artists to design graphic art for them and would become owners of this art. To save added costs, publishers would combine parts of images from one artist's work with that of another to create a new design for a postcard. While it was frustrating to the artists to see his work being cut and pasted with others of perhaps lesser quality, it was a standard practice.

For example, a Frexias Halloween card of the child taking a lid off of a pumpkin, was later used as a Valentine by replacing the base of the pumpkin with a heart. However, they neglected to remove the pumpkin lid from the child's hand.

Many of the Winsch postcards illustrated here have pieces of Schmucker's work used as background with children that have been designed by a different artist. Look carefully at the images. In one case the top postcard has been divided in two with the top half of the image being a background on one card and the bottom half of the image as a background on a different postcard.

These types of designs confuse beginning collectors. I am frequently asked, "Is this a Schmucker?" And the answer has to be, well, yes and no. He did the background work.