This week’s featured item is a little bit different to previous weeks – it’s an original Picturegoer Magazine Postcard Club membership card, which entitled the holder to ‘all the privileges of the “Picturegoer” Postcard Club’.  The most prominent of these ‘privileges’ was allowing the holder to purchase a frequent supply of black and white or hand-coloured postcards of one’s favourite Hollywood stars – including Rin Tin Tin!

All of our postcards were donated by the original owner of this membership card, Mr. Denis Houlston. Denis wrote about discovering and joining the Postcard Club in a 1995 letter (sent to the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain [CCINTB] research project):

‘I think when I was 9 or 10 and in bed ill a family friend unwittingly gave my mother a large pile of “PICTUREGOER”S to interest me. I was hooked and on return to fanatically-football health bought it every week. I joined the ‘Picturegoer’ Picture club and amassed a collection of glossy sepia postcards 6”x4” of my idols.’

The CCINTB project interviewed Denis in April 1995, where he explained that though there was no date on the membership card, he believes it would have been in either 1931 or 1932 that he received it. He also explained a bit more about the process or ordering the postcards and how he amassed such fantastic collection:

‘…for threepence each you could get a sepia photograph of your favourite star, so there’s a list, you sent off for them. But if you ordered twelve you could get them for 2 and 6, which is what, 12 and a half pence now, each. So I totalled that, twelve and a half for twelve! A penny each instead of threepence. So I had a collection oh, I collected these avidly.’

Thanks to Denis, we now have a collection of some 199 Picturegoer postcards, featuring a wide range of actors, actresses and, as mentioned earlier, even a dog! What was once a childhood pastime for Denis has become a valuable resource for historians from a wide range of disciplines.

Denis remained interested in film and cinemagoing throughout his life. Writing in a 2002 letter to Annette Kuhn (by which time he was in his late 80s) he stated that he had become involved with the North-West Film Archive to explore how cinemas could better serve hard of hearing audiences, some seventy years on from his joining the Picturegoer Postcard Club

(Note, the address details have been smudged here for redaction purposes, the original copy is un-edited)