Long before Photoshop or fancy phone cameras that can digitally alter a photograph with filters, cropping, color and lighting adjustments — all in seconds — there were exaggeration postcards.
Exaggeration postcards were a fun genre that depicted enormous vegetables, giant fish, oversized rabbits, gigantic livestock, and crops so huge they required ladders, saws, wagons, or railroad cars to harvest and move. The joke was obvious, of course, but there was also a bit of advertising tucked inside the humor.
Archer King was key to developing the genre. As a professional photographer with studios in southeast Nebraska, he took plenty of serious photographs of farms, prize livestock, rural scenes, and everyday life. But around 1908–1909, he also created a wonderful series of novelty postcards showing a Nebraska where everything seemed to grow — well, a little too much.
At least, that was the message — to sell Nebraska to the rest of the country and present the state as fertile, productive, prosperous, and full of opportunity.
King was an energetic man, always looking toward his next project. In addition to photography, he built three automobiles, operated movie theaters, and built his own home.
Clearly, he was not a man short on imagination. To manipulate photographs of a scale that grand required patience and skill. Early photographers used techniques such as combining portions of several photographs or negatives, hand-coloring, retouching, and carefully adjusting scale and perspective.
So imagine receiving a postcard from Nebraska in 1909. Instead of a courthouse or Main Street scene, you open your mail and see a farmer standing beside a stalk of corn so enormous he needs a ladder and handsaw to harvest it.
Would you believe it?
Of course not.
But you’d remember it, and that was part of the genius of exaggeration postcards.
The years from about 1905 to 1915 are often called the golden age of postcards in America. Postcards cost only a penny to mail and were wildly popular as souvenirs, greetings, and little snapshots of life in towns across the country.
Maybe that is why Archer King’s postcards still feel fun more than a century later.
Today, Nebraska tourism might use social media, video, or a catchy advertising campaign. Archer King only had a camera, scissors, photographic know-how, and a very large ear of imaginary corn.
More than one hundred years later, we are still looking at his pictures. That may be the best advertisement of all.
Here are a few of Archer King’s exaggeration postcards.
If you were going to send someone a postcard, which of these would you choose?
Have you seen an exaggeration postcard before?
Last week I was on a writing retreat/vacation in the Wisconsin Dells. Not the west, but a place I’d never been before. I confess I had preconceived notions about the Dells. I thought it was a tourist town full of water parks and resorts and geared to kids and families. Well, to be honest, the Dells are a tourist town full of water parks (20!! Supposedly the most water parks in one town in the world) and geared to kids and families. But you know what? It turned out to be fine because we saw some gorgeous natural sights, drank some amazing wine, and enjoyed some remarkable scenery while we were there.
The history of the area was most fascinating and what I mainly want to share with you today. The gorge that the Wisconsin River flows through is a wonderland of sandstone cliffs formed some 19,000 years ago when a glacial lake burst an ice dam and unleashed a flood that cut deep narrow gorges into the sandstone. What was left were all kinds of unusual rock formations, sone as high as 100 feet.
We took a tour boat ride up the river to view the incredible cliffs and even walked through a formation that was called the Witch’s Gulch—a fascinating moss-covered slot canyon that was spectacular with different-colored striated layers of sandstone. At one point, we had to squeeze through two sections that were very snug together. Beautiful trees, ferns, and other plants grow out of the sandstone cliffs. We also learned about the photographer H.H. Bennett (he invented the stop-action shutter for catching motion in photography), who made the Dells famous with his photographs of the area. We discovered the history and culture of the Ho-Chunk Nation, who’ve lived in the region and across Wisconsin for thousands of years.
I got words written on my WIP, my travel buddy got a blanket made for her college-age grandson so he’ll be warm in his Wisconsin dorm this winter, so all in all, a successful trip. If you’ve never been to the Wisconsin Dells, I recommend a visit, but unless you’re looking for a waterpark experience, I’d make it in late fall after the tourist season. The town may be known as the water park capital of the world, but it’s also full of history and natural wonders that are must-sees.
FYI and apropos of nothing I’ve been talking about: If you love sweet cowboy romance, 
The second is because of my grandson. He loves band aids for every little scrape on his body. His choice, of course, isn’t the utilitarian band aid, but ones depicting Superman, dinosaurs, or Paw Patrol, or Lightning McQueen. He wears them like a badge of honor, pointing them out to everyone he meets.
