Greetings from New Jersey: A Postcard Tour of the Garden State

Long before Bruce Springsteen picked up a glossy Tichnor Brothers postcard to decorate his first album cover in 1973, vacationers were sending the signature "Greetings from Asbury Park" card to family and friends. They were also mailing greetings from Newark, Camden, Sea Isle City, and Seaside Heights. In fact, sending postcards began as a fad in the final years of the nineteenth century and continues to this day as travel-happy Americans send their loved ones "wish you were here" messages from destinations far and wide. Greetings from New Jersey is the first book to look back at the postcards that have played a part in New Jersey's travel industry. Basing the structure of the book on the state's six official tourism regions - Gateway, Skylands, the Delaware River, Greater Atlantic City, the Southern Shore, and the Shore - Helen-Chantal Pike provides through her section introductions and lengthy captions a general history of each region and a detailed history of each postcard. The nearly four hundred postcards included in the book have been selected from her personal collection of more than three thousand. The final chapter of the book elaborates on the history of postcard use from 1893, and details the different collectible genres of postcards. Accessibly written and loaded with full color reproductions of vintage postcards, Greetings from New Jersey will be of interest not only to tourists, but to all state residents and historians as well.