Tool · Curt Teich & Co., Chicago, 1898–1978

Curt Teich number decoder

Curt Teich printed more view postcards than anyone on earth, and its production numbers encode when each card was made. Find the number — usually small, in a corner of the front or back, like 7B561 or A87976 — and type it exactly as printed.

How the numbering works

The company changed systems several times across eighty years. The earliest cards (1900–1908) carry plain numbers up to 14989. From 1908 to 1928, numbers ran with an A or R prefix up to A124180 — dates before 1913 are reconstructed and approximate; from 1922 on they're well documented. In 1929–30 the year was printed right on the card after a dash (6262-29). From 1930 the number itself became a code: a year digit, a decade letter (A for the 1930s through E for the 1970s), and often a process letter — H for the linen-era Art Colortone, K for the glossy Curteichcolor. So 6BH2667 reads: 6 + B(1940s) = 1946, Art Colortone. Side series existed too — D numbers for mixed printed pieces, two-letter prefixes like RC, and the sparsely recorded C series — and the decoder knows which ones can be dated confidently, which only approximately, and which honestly can't.

All ranges come from the Guide to Dating Curt Teich Postcards prepared by the Lake County Discovery Museum (2011) and published by the Newberry Library, which holds the Curt Teich Archives — about 2.5 million items. Three apparent misprints in the source tables are corrected here and disclosed: the 1940 bound printed “OB996” (read as 0B996), the 1954 bound “2CP2109” (read as 4CP2109), and the 1960 bound “0CK2443” (read as 0DK2443).