Breaking the Curteich Code

Do you know how to find out the age of the Pitcairn Island postcards published by Curteich? With many postcards, the only way to work out roughly when they were published is to find used copies with easy to read postmarks, and then go by the earliest. Fortunately, the American postcard publisher Curteich, also known as Curt Teich & Co, based in Chicago, had a special code printed on their cards which I can now tell you how to translate.

Each code begins with a number and then a letter, A, B, C, or D. This letter refers to the decade, A being the 1930s, B the 1940s, C the 1950s and D the 1960s, and the number preceding is the year.

Therefore, reference 9B489-N, which is used on the Boats Shed card illustrated here (Ransom's Pitcairn Postcard Catalogue number C4-2), indicates that the card was printed in the year 1949 (9B), and that it was the 489th card manufactured that year by Curteich.

The code, 9DK-1095, is in the stamp box on the back of this Pitcairn Bible postcard published in 1969 (Catalogue number C6-2) 

In the Catalogue are quite a few very nice Curteich Pitcairn cards, published over a 20 year period from 1949 to 1969. Section "C" of the Catalogue is available as a free download by following this link.