Lower Falls, Shasta Springs, CA

I have not had much interaction with serious postcard collectors in the years I’ve been mailing away my collection, but I am pretty sure the consensus would be that this is an inferior postcard. The color palette is limited, the card stock thin, the writing surface glossy in a way that resists ink. And yet I find it interesting, the comic book version of a waterfall, anticipating pop art by a few decades. If I went into a drugstore in 1920 and confronted a whole rack full of cards like this, no doubt I would be bemoaning the loss of the beautiful German postcard printing tradition as a casualty of World War I. But since it is 2020 and most of these were deemed not worth saving, we have something that is novel, and novelty is an ingredient in beauty.