Teich, Curt, and Company Building - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 57.246 W 087° 40.362
16T E 444248 N 4644898
Curt Teich and Company operated from 1898 through 1978 as the world's largest volume printer of view and advertising postcards. The location at Irving Park & Ravenswood has since been rehabbed into rental apartments, called "Postcard Place."
Waymark Code: WM6MMM
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 06/21/2009
Views: 2
From Wikipedia:
"Curt Teich was a printer who immigrated to the United States from Lobenstein, Germany in 1896. Curt and his wife Anna Niether Teich lived in Glenview, Illinois. They had four children -- Curt Jr., Lawrence, Louise and Ralph. Lawrence was killed in Bataan. Louise (Raymond Chmelik) had four children -- Raymond (Mike), Susan-Ann, James and Christine. Ralph donated the archives of the company to the Lake County Museum in Illinois, so they may continue to be used for research purposes."
Excerpt from (
visit link)
"Over its 80-year history, the company produced cards featuring more than 10,000 towns and cities in North America and 87 foreign countries.
Like many business owners, Teich played a key sales role. In 1905, he took a 90-day train trip from Chicago to the West Coast. At every stop, he photographed the top sights: Main Street, the town square, scenic views, anything and everything that might be of interest. Teich then persuaded local business people to stock and sell the cards. The minimum order was 1,000 cards of a subject at $1 per thousand. That first trip was a great success — Teich reportedly returned to Chicago with $30,000 in orders.
During World War II, the company found another use for its large-format presses. In addition to printing 32 cards to a sheet, the presses were ideal for printing maps. Curt Teich & Co. printed more than three million maps, including about half of the invasion maps used by U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe. "
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FYI
The Curt Teich Postcard Archives(see (
visit link) part of the Lake County Discovery Museum, is recognized throughout the world as the largest public collection of postcards and related materials. The Postcard Archives was created by the company's policy of saving copies of every image printed. The company also saved the printing process production materials, including photographic prints and negatives, client letters (detailing if and how a view should be altered), layout drawings and physical remnants such as carpet, linoleum, or wallpaper, which had been sent to the company to serve as color samples. The Archives contains approximately 100,000 job files. Materials represent all the states of the USA and all provinces of Canada, as well as other foreign countries.
The Archives came to the Lake County Museum in Wauconda, IL, in 1982 and has been available for research use since 1985. It is computer indexed by location, date and subject with over 350,000 image records in the computer database.