Over 3,000 postcards and other ephemera documenting women’s social history and the material culture of everyday life from the late 19th century through the 1930s, are now housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Postcards are being scanned and will soon be available online. Here are some examples of postcards from the collection.
In 2024, the Library Company of Philadelphia acquired the Alpert Collection, recognizing its significance for researchers in women’s history, visual culture, and American social life.
The collection is being cataloged and digitized for scholarly access. Researchers can request access through the Library Company’s reading room.
The Alpert Collection began in the early 1990s with a single postcard of Boston’s West End—a neighborhood demolished during urban renewal. That initial curiosity grew into a decades-long quest to document the lives, communities, and social movements preserved in ephemera.
Over thirty years, Kathy built the collection through careful research, strategic acquisitions, and relationships with dealers, collectors, and institutions. The focus remained consistent: postcards that revealed women’s voices, vanished neighborhoods, and the material traces of social history often overlooked by traditional archives.
The collection includes hand-written correspondence, hand-tinted images, advertising postcards, suffrage materials, leap year satires, and holiday greetings—each item a fragment of a larger story about how people lived, loved, organized, and communicated.
By placing the collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Kathy ensured its preservation and accessibility for future generations of scholars, students, and curious minds.
Discover the stories, research, and preservation work behind one of America’s most significant postcard collections.
