17.00 USD
A hush falls over the audience. Even the calliope is silent now. The ringmaster, with an almost sinister air of mystery, doffs his black silk hat and bows deeply. The air is heavy with the smells of freshly roasted peanuts and apples, popcorn, sawdust, the manure of animals, the sweat of a closely packed crowd. All eyes are glued to the center ring in delighted anticipation of the unknown. What thrilling spectacle is about to unfold? We can expect tightrope-walkers, acrobats, dancers from strange and forbidden kingdoms, that daring young man, or woman, on the flying trapeze, jugglers and clowns. We are under the big top, the largest tent on the circus grounds, its central pole as big around as the trunk of a great tree, reaching from the eye-dazzling lights and sequined sparkles of the central ring, up, up into the heights of impenetrable darkness and gloom.
In this section, "Under the Big Top," we hope to entice you with the romantic images of circus performers, and of variety artists whose acts appeared on the bills not only of circuses, but of those variety shows that played on a stage, at a time when the movie industry was still in its earliest infancy, when, before the advent of television, or even radio, entertainment was always live.
Awesome early circus photo of an artiste by the name of Saltorelli. We cannot find any history on her, unfortunately. We are not thrilled with the print quality on this one, nor by the surface blemishes. This is an instance, believe it or not, of our scans actually making the card look worse than it appears face to face. The little white dots are certainly blemishes of some sort, but not really as noticeable as they seem in the close up.
Few of our customers, as far as we know, are stamp collectors, but there must be a few of them who drop by now and again. It would make sense, since we largely purchase our stock with image and history in mind, and so don't look too closely at most of the stamps, and we have no doubt that some fairly valuable ones have slipped by us.
The collection of "covers" (simply, and we hope correctly described as, postcards and envelopes that bear stamps and cancellations), is a field where postcard collecting and stamp collecting overlap.
When one of our postcards bears a canceled stamp, it becomes a cover. This particular cover, bearing a Principaute de Monaco red 10c Albert, posted to Paris in 1904, would appear to be valued (in the online stamp world) at somewhere between 15 and 50 dollars. We're just throwing that out there as a point of possible interest, but as usual are basing our price on image, history, perceived scarcity and condition.
A lovely circus item, with some wear to surface, corners and edges. Please examine our high res scans for detail.
Postage is for first class shipping in a secure photo mailer, and we happily combine shipping on all paper goods. If you purchase two cards, we will refund the postage on the second card, and when you purchase three or more cards from us at the same time, your shipping will be entirely free, except for international orders which, because of sudden increases in international shipping rates will still be charged one card's shipping fees on orders of three or more.
And please come visit our blog at:
redpoulaine.blogspot.com
where we post biographical and historical tidbits, images of cards and photographs for sale, some already sold but remembered fondly, related images of historical interest and sometimes even images of items that have not yet arrived in the shop, but that are expected to arrive soon, as well as coupon codes, links to other related sites, and more!