Curt Teich Postcard Archive to be donated to Chicago library

Williams, Arizona, Curt Teich Postcard Archive

TheCurt Teich Postcard Archive, which contains thousands of vintage images from Route 66 from the 1920s to the 1970s, soon will be donated to The Newberry library in Chicago.

The Lake County Forest Preserve District, which had owned the archive for decades, said the deal to The Newberry likely will be finalized sometime next week after negotiations began in April, reported the Daily Herald.

“It’s going to open the world to the possibilities,” the district’s education director Nan Buckardt said of the move. “We just don’t have the resources to expand the usership in the way it deserves.”

As for the Newberry, it has advantages Lake Forest does not, including more staffing:

The Teich archive will be housed in a secure, environmentally controlled 10-story building and eventually be available for research and public use and review. […]
To-be-scheduled “massive” and “complicated” moves will be done in two stages, with the production files first, Schreyer said. Newberry has six months after the agreement is approved to make the transfer.
The ownership transfer is expected to reduce construction costs of the forest district’s new collection care facility by $800,000, and save $105,000 in annual salary and data storage costs.

Curt Teich & Co., which began in Chicago in 1898, quickly rose to become the largest postcard manufacturer in the world.

According to a recent book, “Portrait of Route 66,” about the archive, Curt Teich & Co. closed its doors for good in 1978 and donated its archive to Lake County shortly after that.

The Daily Herald reported the archive contains 3 million postcards, and the book reported it includes more than 360,000 production files, including original photography used for the postcard images.

According to an op-ed in the Lake County News-Sun in 2015, the Lake County Forest Preserve at one point offered to give the archive to the University of Illinois in Champaign — a distance of more than 170 miles from its Windy City roots. In the end, the archive will stay in Chicago.

(A 1940 postcard image from Curt Teich Postcard Archive of the Route 66 town of Williams, Arizona, via Illinois Digital Archive)

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