Postcard Purveyor to Sign Off

Looking like a vintage postcard character in his electric-blue lounge-lizard suit, Wyatt Landesmann paces his North Beach shop, surrounded by tens of thousands of his off-the-wall curios.

There’s the picture of a man seemingly driving 8-inch spikes into his skull, an upside-down house, waitresses decked out in lobster jumpsuits and the revealing shot of the American nudists dining out.

And don’t forget the circus contortionist, the creepy wax museum image of Jack Ruby gunning down assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, or the big-haired spokeswoman for the “Fabulous Motel Industry.”

For 23 years, Landesmann has been this city’s campy prince of retro postcards. He’s an editor, collector and salesman who has peddled countless 4-by-6-inch images ranging from the kitschy to the downright bizarre--a tactile landscape that Landesmann holds dear to his alternative heart.

But now the veteran postcard purveyor is closing up shop, shutting down his last two stores and a once-thriving mail-order business. He’s become an old-school casualty to a rising new technology: Internet e-mail.

Landesmann says the ubiquitous computer missives have emerged as the postcard of the new millennium, assuming the role paper cards once played for such impulsive sentiments as “Thinking of you” or “Wish you were here.”

“Postcards no longer fill the void for the simple, offhand gesture--now e-mail serves that function,” says the 48-year-old St. Louis native. “People don’t walk by my store and see a postcard and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna send this to Bob or Mary,’ because they just e-mailed them yesterday. And that fact has impacted my business.”

Experts say written communication is fast evolving from the bulky world of paper products into the realm of cyberspace.

But the rush toward new technology has claimed an unintended victim--the peculiar niche-world of oddball postcards. With their widespread use originating at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, postcards for generations played a vital role in the upkeep of personal relationships, featuring scribbled thought fragments left open for all to read, without the privacy of an envelope.

Many were vacation reminders dashed off from Disneyland or Cape Cod. Others were hokey snapshots from an American pop culture that no longer exists--renderings of outdated farm supplies, kitchen appliances or comic book characters. There were movie star glamour shots, goofy family portraits and pre-skyscraper panoramas of cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

People soon began saving postcards as mementos. Like coins and stamps, the stranger cards became objects for collectors. But slowly, with shifting public habits and increasing prices of both the cards and stamps, Americans stopped sending postcards to express everyday thoughts. And trade in the most freakish cards may soon disappear altogether.

Now Hallmark cards and the U.S. Postal Service--not to mention companies such as Blue Mountain--feature Internet cards to capitalize on the cyber trend. Postal officials estimate that 2003 will mark the first time in the agency’s 228-year-history that the amount of paper mail will decline--a downturn attributed largely to the Internet.

“Every day, the world moves faster and consumer behavior changes,” said Bob Krause, manager of new business for the U.S. Postal Service. “People are moving toward the electronic realm. What was once in the physical world is being moved to the virtual world.”

Of 2.2 million “hybrid” mail pieces sent last year--created online by customers and converted by the post office into hard-copy mail--four of 10 were postcards.

But many addicts of deviant postcard stores say that no online Hallmark offerings can match the freak factor of the fare offered by Landesmann and others.

“There’s the wonderful kitsch factor that can never be duplicated on the Net,” said customer Jeff Estow as he browsed in one of Landesmann’s stores. “I mean, you’re not going to find a glazed doughnut postcard on Yahoo.”

Another one of Estow’s favorites shows two vultures picking over a human carcass in the desert heat. The back of the card simply reads: “End of the Trail: Was this a gunslinger who was not as fast as the law? Or a prospector who was dry-gulched by some low-down varmint? Regardless, someone’s supper was provided.”

Or the image of a pensive man in a full body tattoo with the postscript: “What price mistakes?”

Bevan Davies, whose wife in 1969 started perhaps the nation’s first alternative postcard store in New York City, agrees that business has fallen. “We used to sell nothing but postcards,” he said. “But not anymore. We can’t afford to.”

Indeed, as prices rose for funky postcards, competitors appeared. Once bought for a penny, many now cost a dollar or more. Free advertising cards available on racks in bars and restaurants have also diluted sales.

“The postcard has had its day,” said collector Tom Moore, former president of Florida’s Tropical Postcard Club. “Very few are being sent. Even I send fewer cards.”

Some say what killed Landesmann’s business wasn’t so much the Internet as the mainstream tastes of San Francisco’s young dot-com workers. “The growth of the dot-com thing helped spawn the cookie-cutter store--the Starbucks and Banana Republic--that has drove out independents like Wyatt,” said Mary Hada, a manufacturer’s sales representative who handles postcards and other products. “What he created there was so unique. He’s the last of a breed.”

All of this talk of postcards on the edge saddens Landesmann.

He worries about his tens of thousands of postcards--the pioneering linen cards, the shiny chrome-finished cards first produced in the 1950s, the Spanish-language James Bond cards. “This is the only job I’ve ever had,” he said.

He discovered postcards when, as a child, he opened a trunk owned by his antique-dealer father and found images that challenged his imagination: “Opening that trunk was like entering another world.”

In the 1970s, he began selling cards, scouring postcard shows, buying tens of thousands of cards at a time from out-of-business companies. “They’d tell me, ‘Sure, you can fly out and look at our archives, but it’s mostly junk,’ ” Landesmann recalls. “But what was junk to them was a treasure to me.”

At the height of his business, he ran four stores--three in the Bay Area and one in New Orleans. What attracts Landesmann to the retro cards are the hidden metaphors each contains--such as the “Big Boy series” featuring an overweight man in various poses inside a drab 1950s motel room.

“You send a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge and that’s what you get--a picture of a bridge,” he says. “But within these retro cards lies a special meaning between sender and receiver. They represent a shared sense of humor or experience, often something only the two will get.”

Kelley Matsuda, 31, began frequenting Landesmann’s stores as a child. “It’s sad to lose touch with this old snail mail,” she said. “It’s so much fun. E-mail is efficient, but it’s impersonal.”

Postcard fan Rob Pitagora says he still relishes receiving mail the old way. “You know that the sender went to the trouble of searching for a card, writing a message, buying a stamp and sending it off,” he said. “And what you get is something you can hold in your hands and save if you want--all without a computer ever being turned on.”

Landesmann overhears him.

“You’re a dying breed,” he says to Pitagora. “Five years ago, there were many people who shared your view. But they’re gone; at least they no longer come to my store.”

Nowadays, Landesmann gives free postcards with many purchases, still bagging sold cards in 1950s “Delicious Cheeseburger” wrappers he bought wholesale from some roadside greasy spoon in the Midwest. Sometime within the next two months, Landesmann will close his stores and then decide what to do with both his life and his beloved stock.

But Landesmann will miss more than just his postcards.

“It’s all the people who also revel in this postcard world--from the skinhead punkers and little old ladies to the 6-year-old boys.

“They’re the ones I’ll miss.”