CALIFORNIA Shasta Spriings Drinking Fountain RPPC 1915

This is a vintage REAL PHOTO postcard, postally unused, circa 1915. SHASTA WATER FOR HEALTH, probably true today~ Drinking Fountain, Shasta Springs, California Calif Cal CA. This water was said to to be aid in cases of stomach and kidney disorder. Real photo views of this fountain are quite rare!

Card publisher/photographer

The overall condition is good or better. As grading is subjective, please look at scan for faults/defects.

The vogue of lithographed cards caught Eastman-Kodak's attention. They issued an affordable "Folding Pocket Kodak" camera around 1906. This allowed the mass public to take black & white photographs and have them printed directly onto paper with postcard backs. Various other models of Kodak "postcard" cameras followed igniting a real photo postcard era. These cameras shared two neat features: their negatives were postcard size (the major reason why so many of these images are so clear) and they had a small thin door on the rear of their bodies that, when lifted, enabled the photographer to write an identifing caption or comment on the negative itself with an attached metal scribe. This is the reason that so many of the earlier photo cards are "one of a kind".

Early on professional photographers capitalized on the new craze and themselves captured images that they printed on the processing papers that were being made available by a number of companies at the time. They advertised their ability to make as many copies as you liked from your negatives.

As the decades passed and new technologies developed, it became even more common for commercial photographers to mass-produce and market these real photo postcards, which reached their zenith in the 1940's.