Antique & Vintage Postcards

A beautifully engraved color street map of central London — from Euston and King's Cross stations down through Bloomsbury to Holborn and Lincoln's Inn — fills most of this card, parks and squares picked out in fresh green, major landmarks labelled in crisp typography, while a detailed halftone vignette of the British Museum's imposing Greek Revival colonnade anchors the lower right corner in a decorative cartouche. Published as No. 105 in the "Geographical Series" by John Walker & Co. Ltd., with the map itself engraved by J. Bartholomew & Co. of Edinburgh — the most prestigious cartographic firm in Britain — this is as much a miniature work of cartographic art as it is a postcard. The undivided back, printed in red with a naval anchor motif and the note "For the British Isles only," dates it firmly to the pre-1902/1905 era, making it a rare survival of the very earliest wave of British pictorial map postcards.