L. W. Currey, Inc.

DETROIT PUBLISHING COMPANY. Little Phostint journeys volume XXVII the Yosemite and the Big Trees [box title]. Detroit: Detroit Publishing Company, n.d. [Circa 1907-1924.]. A set of forty postcards, enclosed a cardboard folder and slipcase (as issued). Published after 1907 when messages on postcards were permitted on postcards with backs divided to allow a message on one side and an address on the other. The photographs on these penny postcards appear to have been taken between 1900 and 1910; one image is copyright 1902 by Detroit Photographic Co. (the company changed its name to Detroit Publishing Company in 1905). "Photochroms and Phostints (the brand name for the Detroit Photographic Company’s Photochrom postcards), as well as their black-and-white source images, which were taken by such esteemed late nineteenth and early twentieth century American photographers as William Henry Jackson, Lycurgus Solon Glover, and Henry Greenwood Peabody. Together, these photographers cataloged the natural and man-made marvels of the continent, bringing their cameras from the great cities of the Northeast and Upper Midwest to the mountains and deserts of the still-wild West. Photochroms were a European invention ... They were the creation of a Swiss lithographer named Hans Jacob Schmid who, in 1888, devised the earliest example of commercially viable color photography, although the process is actually a hybrid of traditional photo-developing techniques and stone lithography. 'They start with a black-and-white negative,' explains Arqué, 'which is exposed on lithographic stones, as many as are needed.' Four stones --- one each for red, yellow, blue, and black --- were the minimum for most Photochroms, but some were created using as many as 14 stones when subtleties in color were required. Each stone was individually inked and its image, or piece of an image, was transferred to a sheet of paper, which was printed layer by layer until a full-color version of the scene originally captured in black-and-white was revealed.For the most part, DPC’s postcards and prints focused on an idealized America, from the leisure of canoeing in New York’s Adirondacks to the tourist spectacle of rain dances performed by Zuni Pueblo Indians. That’s what sold postcards, and by 1905, DPC was selling a lot of them, enough to support a staff of 40, with outlets in New York and Los Angeles. Between 1899 and 1905, DPC’s catalog grew to include 1,600 American scenes, from small postcards to poster-size 'Mammoths.' They even sold black-and-whites (they owned all those Jackson negatives, so why not?). In a good year, DPC printed some 7 million images. The first decade of the 20th century was also when DPC joined forces with one of the biggest mythologizers of the American West, the Fred Harvey Company, which had built a string of restaurants and hotels along the route of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, as well as other lines. Harvey ordered hundreds of thousands of DPC Phostints, which were sold in hotel gift shops to guests, alongside the jewelry, blankets, and baskets the company commissioned from the photogenic native populations. By the second decade of the century, though, Photochroms and Phostints were losing their luster, in part because of competition from publishers whose offset-lithographed products cost much less than DPC’s, but also because of World War I, which diverted resources to the war effort. After the war, in 1920, American was gripped by recession, which forced DPC into receivership in 1924, when its inventory of 40,000 negatives were sold. Some ended up at the State Historical Society of Colorado but most now reside in the Library of Congress, including 25,000 negatives, 300 Photochroms, and 900 glass plates by William Henry Jackson" (2014, Ben Marks, Collectors Weekly website)The "big trees" include Sequoia sempervirens in the groves north of Santa Cruz region, as well as the groves of Sequoia gigantea in the Sierra Nevada. A fine set. Enclosed in the original cardboard folder and box (rubbed). (#167289).