Post Card Views of Edinburgh - Valentine's

Post Cards Publishers

Valentine's

Dates of Negatives

British Postcards

Most Valentine cards (certainly most published from 1914 onwards) have numbers on the front of the cards, sometimes in very small print. These numbers relate to the date of the negative used for the postcard, not the date that the card was published or when it might have been posted.

In some cases, where there was little change in the subject being photographed, such as the Palace of Holyrood, Valentine's might have re-used the same negative on a new postcard many decades later.

The table below gives the negative dates for British postcards:

Decade	Numbering begins
1870s	1
1880s	1869 approx
1890s	11788
1900s	32485
1910s	65895 approx
1920s	83205
1930s	208471. Also A1, G1, H1, R1, W1
1940s	A9561, B1 H3044 R1568 W2102
1950s	B2537, D1 H8284, K1 L1 R2028 W3094
1960s	D4850, L9858 M1 R5823 W7612
The details above have been taken from a small informative booklet produced by St Andrews University Library in 1999.: 'University of St Andrews Valentine Collection' The booklet, itself, giver fuller details including the numbering for each year and a brief history of Valentines of Dundee.

Canadian Postcards

The above booklet, published by St Andrews University Library, states:

"With a few exceptions, the overseas views were assigned to other sequences whose registers are not preserved n St Andrews University Library and which were probably not housed in Valentine's Dundee office."

However, Jean-Paul Viauld has been investigating the date of a Valentine's postcard of a Montreal streetcar, and has discovered more details. Jean-Paul wrote:

"The number on the streetcar postcard is 100617. I was able to contact the Toronto post cards collectors club which maintain an extensive database of the Canadian production.

The Valentine's cards with Quebec subject in particular, are numbered from 100000 and 115000. Less than 1,000 have been preserved from the 15,000 production, ranging from 1906 to 1918. Ours is from 1906"

Jean-Paul Viauld, Canada: July 14, 2008