Your Old Postcards Might Actually Be Worth A Ton Of Money

People can be sweet and simple creatures, and postcards are the proof. For generations, folks have sent bits of beautiful cardboard through the mail to share a bit of travel magic with friends and family back home. Or maybe, they're sharing a bit of home with a loved one gone far away. Possibly, a postcard is a souvenir someone picks up for themselves, to commemorate a special moment in time.

World Series wins by a favorite team, an engagement on a Hawaiian beach, a visit to a small ancestral hometown or roadside diner shaped like an owl: There's a postcard for that. Likely, one dashed off in the final minutes of a trip, while desperate to find a mailbox before the next plane, train, or automobile leaves the station. Plenty of money mistakes can be made while traveling, but snapping up a cheap and pretty postcard isn't usually one of them.

But years (and decades) later as people sift through boxes of old papers and closets full of clutter, their minds may start to wonder ... how much might those old postcards be worth, long after their initial stamp price and sentimental value has been spent? You might be surprised to learn that the amount of money some old postcards are worth is actually something to write home about.

Valuable old postcards are like Pokémon cards that are worth a ton of money: rare, but worth the hunt. Postcards that fit the high-dollar bill can sometimes fetch hundreds. Not bad, considering some of them only cost a few dollars at a postcard show or antiques shop. Much like highly collectible sports memorabilia, stories are important to a postcard's value. Sure, a postcard can command high value if it's from the early days of baseball, or signed by a star player. But even non-sports postcards gain value when they help a collector tell a story, or see a fuller picture of the past.

Rare and scarce postcards of small towns always seem to be in some demand for collectors, perhaps because these relics depict otherwise lost town history. Keep your eyes peeled for old postcards with small-town views and street scenes, especially those from pre-1920s Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. Old postcards from smaller neighborhoods in big cities can be valuable, as well as old postcards of institutions still in business, like hotels.

Many more fiddly aspects can be considered by serious postcard collectors, like the type of formatting the card uses, what it was printed on, etc. But even the casual collector can look for writing on the back of cards — sometimes famous names are found in a quickly-scrawled greeting, and can take a card's value from ten cents to thousands.

Picture postcard collections have been going strong since the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and some of the most valuable old postcards can be traced to photographers working in the 1900s. Postcard dealer historian Daniel May, the brains behind Mailseum, advises to keep a lookout for cards featuring turn-of-the-century photographs from W.E. Burgess (who worked frequently in Virginia) and Jessie Tarbox Beals (who snapped many New York City locations).

Further, "real photo" postcards tend to be more valuable than "printed photo" postcards (that is, a photo developed onto the actual paper postcard, versus a photo printed onto the postcard). Real photos are represented by solid images, while printed photos show images made of tiny printed dots when examined closely. Popular postcards regardless of photo quality include holiday cards, night scenes, and Hawaiian cards from postcard publisher The Island Curio Co.

So what are some top-dollar postcards? For some, you could command several hundred dollars. Mailseum, for example, says a birds-eye view of a lost mining town in Golden Circle, Nevada, sold for $688, while a Burgess postcard of Virginia went for $900. Looking around eBay, in September 2024, a lot of 6,250 postcards from the 1900s to the 1950s sold for $2,000.

And, to keep quirky images in the postcard game, a vintage Halloween postcard from the 1910s featuring a grim reaper playing a serenade to little goblins in the moonlight could be a collector's today for $295. Again, not bad, considering the postcard likely cost five cents to send to a friend back in the day.