For many years David Sklow has been collecting postcards depicting the Philadelphia Mint, and these can now be viewed on the Newman Portal. This is the essence of collecting - diligently searchingover a long period of time for items that aren't necessarily expensive, but devilishly difficult to locate. One senses in this collection a great deal of time thumbing through postcards for sale, aswell as endless surfing of Internet sites.

The collection also reveals a bit of postcard history - the greatest number of examples relate to the third Philadelphia Mint at Spring Garden and 17th Streets, built in 1901 and in service until1969. The early 20th century represents the perfect storm of numismatics and deltiology - ubiquitous commercial postcard production combined with a new Mint building that sumptuously featured theMint Cabinet until the 1920s, when it was moved to the Smithsonian. Thousands of souvenir-hungry visitors passed through the Mint in this period, and the postcard vendors were all too happy tosatisfy the demand.

Link to the Sklow Collection on NNP:
https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/526626