Post #353401 by bigbrotiki on Sun, Jan 6, 2008 10:36 PM

An enduring mystery, one of the first tropical bar images that re-entered pop culture. The Bartender looks South-American, or maybe, judging by the name of the street, Italian.

Quantity Postcards was a great company, sort of the TASCHEN of postcard companies. Not only did they re-issue vintage 50s postcards unaltered in the front (no "funny" or "cute" one-liners printed across the original images), but they also printed the original captions on the back, which are often funnier than any made-up slogans.

in the early 80s, I used to live one block up the street from their store in North Beach, S.F. which was just across from the Savoy-Tivoli. What a great store, wall to wall postcards. Wayne, the owner, bought up cool old-stock cards and re-sold them, and he even travelled as far as Germany (Italy?) to dig in the archives of old postcard companies for weird images and then get the rights to reprint them. Wish I had kept the coolest ones...some are still in circulation.

The OTHER perennial tropical bar postcard from Quantity is the glass-balancing Stanley The Great. But this one never had the original caption, it was first revealed in Tiki Modern that the photo hailed from Miami's Castaway Hotel Tahitian Bar. :)