Phantom Metro Stations of Paris

This grainy vintage postcard is a rare find. The mustached gentleman is making his way down to what is now called a phantom metro (subway) station in Paris. The stop Saint-Martin was officially closed on September 2, 1939. 

 
The phantom station was recently spiffed up by the Salvation Army of Paris, France. The homeless are sheltered in this antique setting during the bitter winter months. The station still has beautiful porcelain tile advertisements on the walls.


Hopefully warm soup and a bit of old world charm can bring a smile to their face!

Postcard Friendship Friday #23 - Quirky French Potato History

marie antoinette vintage postcard

In 1748 the French Parliment had actually forbidden the cultivation of potatoes. They were feared to cause leprosy! Sit back and enjoy listening to how Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, Benjamin Franklin, and Antoine Parmentier changed the tasty tuber's bad rap! Happy Postcard Friendship Friday:)


PS. Is my voice loud enough in these videos? I was thinking about getting a microphone. What do you think? I definatly need to work on my editing skills too!




Welcome to this weeks Postcard Friendship Friday! If you're visiting and would like to join in the fun we would be thrilled;) It's easy! All you need to do is:

1. Have a blast with this mail theme! Examples include: any type of postcard, a photo of a mailbox, mailman, a stamp image, postcard altered art, or simply a photo of something that you find 'Postcard Perfect' etc etc etc!
2. Link in with Mr.Linky at the bottom of this post
3. Visit as many of the other participants as possible and leave comments! That’s what a blog party is all about!
4. Link back to the party from your post so that your readers can come and see what everyone else is talking about today! Please grab the badge if you'd like to add a bit of PFF colour to your post:)

'R' is for Raggedy Ann

vintage postcards
Here I am clutching my Raggedy Ann doll! Awwwwwww! The first gladdening Raggedy Ann stories (written in 1915 by Johnny Gruelle) were based on a real rag doll found by the author's daughter in an attic trunk.


He drew the famous black eyes and red triangular nose onto the faceless rag doll. From his bookshelf, he pulled a book of poems by James Whitcomb Riley, and combined the names of two poems, "The Raggedy Man" and " Little Orphan Annie." He said, "Why don’t we call her Raggedy Ann?

Lady Godiva likes Vintage Postcards

vintage postcards
Starman commented that the Cycle Gladiator vintage postcard looked like a modern Lady Godiva! Holy good call batman!



Lady Godiva (1040) was that groovy Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who was tired of seeing the people of Coventry suffer under her husband's pesky taxes. He was in turn sick of getting needled by his wife to abolish the tariffs....nag nag nag! He quipped that he would abolish them if she rode naked through town. She did! Wouldn't you?




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No Blue Ruffs Allowed!

vintage postcards

For some reason Queen Elizabeth took against blue ruffs. It was her majesty's pleasure that no blue starch be used or worn by any of her subjects. Ruffs actually came in many colors.



They were tinted with vegetable dyes at the starching stage. Colored ruffs are rarely visible in portraits because of later restorers' conviction that all ruffs were ivory. They 'cleaned' the neckwear until the offending color was gone.

There are no vintage postcards in this post but it is definately quirky:)

Leather Vintage Postcard Fun

My jaw dropped when MK (that groovy wonderful girl) posted this on her blog...


This is for my friend, Marie, our resident antique postcard expert! This is a leather postcard, copyrighted 1907 and sent from Chicago with a penny stamp. It belonged to Adam's great-grandmother.



Novelty leather postcards were printed between 1904 - 1908. The leather was branded and then tinted. Yee-haw cowboy! The US postal service banned them in 1909 because they kept on jamming newly designed sorting machines:)



That cowhide sure is flexible! Thank you so much MK! You're the cow's moo!


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My name is Jane and I am a Quailaholic

Jane Seymour, wife numero 3 of King Henry VIII of England, had a hankering for quails (and vintage postcards) all through her pregnancy.


Henry had the little birds shipped from Calais.

He ordered, 'fat quails which her Grace loveth very well, and longeth not a little for.'
A large consignment of quail did arrive to Jane's relief! (The image below reads Jane the Quene)


She gorged on them at every meal!

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vintage postcards, old postcards , antique postcards

Godly Apple Vintage Postcards

Hercules, as a part of his Twelve Labours was required to fetch the immortality giving golden apples from the tree of life.


The fruit was guarded by a nasty little 100 headed dragon who never slept and a smattering of Hesperides (lovely ladies who tended the orchard).


The apple trees belonged to Hera and Zeus who had received the seeds as a wedding present from Gaia. She might have had vintage potcards on her bridal registry as well.


Hercules easily slew the headache of a mythical beast. The Hespiredes were more difficult to contend with. Heracles tricked Atlas (their Father) into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, by offering to hold up the heavens for a little while.


Atlas easily plucked the forbidden fruit but decided that he did not want to take the heavens back. (Who could blame him) Heracles tricked him again by agreeing to take his place on condition that Atlas relieve him temporarily so that Heracles could make his cloak more comfortable. Atlas agreed, but Heracles (of course) reneged and walked away.


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vintage postcards, old postcards , antique postcards

Vicky's Vintage Wedding Shoes

Queen Victoria wore these minuscule mules on her wedding day in 1840.



She wore a size 3! The woman whose name defines an age was only 5 feet tall and wore no nonsense shoes. Those leather soles are as flat a flounder. This Queen certainly wasn't a 'heel'.



These practical ribbon trimmed slippers were made by Gundry and Sons in London. This is the insole of the shoe. Was it covered by an odor eater on Victoria's big day?




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Sticky Strawberry Vintage Postcards

Does bathing in the juice of fresh strawberries sound sumptuously sticky?


Madame Talien, who was a social figure during the French Revolution, kept her complexion radiant with this messy method of washing.



Twenty-two pounds of crushed strawberries made up the bathwater that went into her tub. Vive strawberry bath gel and vintage postcards!


She was arrested and jailed for being the wife of an aristocrat. She flirted her way out of the guillotine, divorced, and then became a champion for Liberalism. Strawberries saved her scented neck!

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Stinky Cheese Vintage Postcards - Part Deux

The ewe that provides the rich milk for Roquefort cheese comes of a race originally bred in Neolithic times.

It is a remarkably silly-looking sheep with a little flat head, narrow shoulders, a shabby coat of wool. But it has huge udders that can produce 35 gallons of milk a season, up to 110 in prize specimens, and it is quite robust, resistant to the harsh climate.



Local shepherds will tell you that the shallowness of the soil—you can strike solid limestone about four inches down- adds a special richness to the taste of the milk, by limiting the animals' diet to delicate grass.



Roquefort will always cost more than other cheeses, if only because it is more expensive to milk 30 ewes than one cow in order to get an equivalent amount of milk. (These vintage postcard milk cans are filled with frothy warm ewe's milk).


But Roquefort folk insist their cheese is really an economical buy. Unlike Camembert, or Pont 1'Eveque, say, there is little waste, and no crust. Besides, the cheese itself is so rich and satisfying—ewe's milk being twice as rich in butterfat as cow's—that you don't need to eat so much of it.



If you are interested in photos from this region their is a great gal over at an American in Averyron. who has a daily photo blog:)

This article was written by:
1980 Robert Wernick
Smithsonian Magazine February 1982

It was just too nifty to change:)

Stinky Cheese Vintage Postcards

Who munched the first bit of bluey gooey Roquefort?

''One story favored by the local authorities is that a shepherd boy was one day loafing in a cool dark cave, about to eat a rustic lunch of bread and cheese, when he saw a shepherdess go by with her flock.

Dropping his lunch, he raced out after her. What with one thing and another, it was several days before he returned. To his amazement he found that the bread was a mass of green mold and his cheese was all streaked and mottled. Wisely he left the bread alone but ate the cheese. Finding it delicious he called in his friends, and soon every cave along the hillside had a cheese in it.

The news of this discovery spread over the trade routes of old Europe. When the Romans built the great highway, the Via Domitia, that linked the Pyrenees with Italy, it passed not far from Roquefort, and it became relatively easy to send the cheeses to the seacoast and then by coastal shipping to Rome. The Romans, it seems, fell in love with Roquefort. Like all the Mediterranean peoples down to our own time they were used to cheeses, most of which tended to be dry and hard. Roquefort, by contrast, was smooth and soft and tasty, and the Roman aristocrats were willing to pay high prices to have it on their tables.

The Emperor Charlemagne, it is said, used to have a packtrain of mules bring Roquefort to his court at Aix-la-Chapelle every Christmas. Rich landed proprietors even received payments in cheese from local peasants!''

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Louis XIV Puts His Best Shoe Forward

Louis XIV, a short man, liked both his high heels and women red hot! Scarlet was his shoe color of choice. He would have liked vintage postcards too!


The insects dusting these Mexican cactus pads are called cochineal.They're a dusty grey color, until they're squashed -- and then their plump abdomens burst with rich, red liquid. It was used for dying the royal shoes and clothing of the Sun King. This exotic import was highly prized and expensive!


The Sun King's footwear fanaticism drove him to ban everyone except the nobility from wearing high heels. But nobody was allowed to have higher heels than the king! He also had miniature battle scenes painted upon these leather status wielders.



Heel wearing was only curbed by the French Revolution in 1789. It became a disdained sign of nobility. Many silver shoe buckles were "donated" to the Revolutionary cause as their noble owners lost their heads at the guillotine.

I would much rather wear my scruffy converse. There is no need for head rolling here!

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tage postcards

Let's Roll in a Pilain Vintage Car

The French car company Rolland Pilain toots it own horn with the slogan, 'An Ace of a car - The car for aces.' ( L'As des voiture - La voiture des as)


Emile Pilain built the French Ford T's in the early 1900's. This 25 year old from Lyon loved to test, tinker, and build his dreams.

The most popular 'Ferrari' of this era was the Rolland Pilain C23 (shown on the above vintage postcard). This car motored around after it's launch in 1905. About 10,000 were produced! A few still exist and cruise around French motorways. I would like to be in the driver's seat!

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Pushing the Wallpaper Envelope in a pre Vintage Postcard Era

Southerners, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), were virtually paperless as the wars end approached. Paper mills were Northern enterprises which the South didn't have access to. Union Navy blockades barred their passage to foreign markets as well.


As a result every scrap of paper was used and then reused.


Absolutely any bit of paper with sufficient blank space was suddenly stationary. Books were stripped of their title pages to supply letter paper and material for homemade envelopes. Tax receipts, wrapping paper, election ballots, bank checks, accounting forms, music sheets .... etc... were exploited for postal purposes.

The envelopes fashioned out of wallpaper are stunning and slobbered over by .. cough.. geeky collectors! (Like my boyfriend).

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