Antique & Vintage Postcards

A delightful Edwardian accordion-fold souvenir booklet unfurls to reveal four miniature black-and-white photographic views of Croft, a quiet village on the River Tees in North Yorkshire — the panoramic village rooftops glimpsed over a rushing millstream, the hushed nave of the medieval church with its magnificent Perpendicular east window flooding light onto a white-clothed altar, the handsome Croft Spa Hotel with its bold painted advertisement reading "IS IT WORTH DRAWN FROM THE WOOD," and an early motor car parked at the kerb outside. Croft-on-Tees was already celebrated as a spa destination by the Victorian era, and the village church (St. Peter's) holds a famous family pew associated with Lewis Carroll, whose father was rector here — making even this modest souvenir booklet a tangential piece of literary history. The card is numbered No. 470 on the back and carries a "Post Card / Printed Matter" designation on its undivided back, placing it in the early 1900s–1910s.