Antique & Vintage Postcards

Mailed on a July evening in 1922, this vivid hand-colored card showcases the graceful Spanish Colonial Revival home of Sessue Hayakawa — the Japanese-born silent film star who was, astonishingly, one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors of the era, commanding fees that rivaled Charlie Chaplin's — in a Los Angeles neighborhood lush with palms and flowering hedges. The sender, writing to a friend named O. in South Bend, Indiana, fills the reverse with looping cursive that hints at the postcard tourism craze of the early 1920s, when celebrity-home cards sold as fast as studios could print them. The card carries a clean 1¢ Washington stamp and a crisp Los Angeles machine cancel dated July 23, 1922, making it a precisely dateable artifact of Hollywood's golden silent era.