The Postcards of Max Fruchtermann (3 volumes set)

This elegant three volume in a slipcase set comes with a canvas carrying case. The volumes and the dustjackets are in excellent condition. The slipcase has a small damage and the canvas bag shows its age. This interesting set contains a wealth of fascinating photographs and is a beautiful presentation item, an impressive gift or a delight to keep for your own pleasure.

Born in 1852 in Kalucz, a town on the eastern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Max Fruchtermann came to Istanbul in 1867 and two years later opened a picture framing shop in the city. Having decided to have the first Ottoman Postcard Series printed at Breslau in 1895, he ensured through his cards, which number in the millions, that the name "Turkey and the multifarious images associated with it" spread throughout the entire world from Canada to New Zeland.

In 1966 when Fruchtermann's daughter-in-law Anna, before closing down the establishment, sold her remaining stock (subsequently realized to number around 600,000) to a secondhand dealer for 2500 liras, she probably never imagined the importance of her father-in-laws postcards. They are not simply photographs of landscape panoramas monumental buildings and people of the time. They are individual documents that reflect in their human types and cross-sections of everyday life the noteworthy political incidents of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the ethnic and cultural diversity embodied in the Ottoman identity. As such they have acquired significance far in excess of original expectations.

It always comes as a pleasant surprise to collectors to see that ordinary objects left to us from the past, and usually assumed to be of mere functional value, in time acquire special significance. For us, however, far more than a pleasant surprise these postcards are a door opening up on our recent history. The places, incidents and types that Fruchtermann saw and appraised with his own eyes have been given new life and brought together as a whole thanks to this study and up-to-date treatment by our esteemed colleague, Mert Sandalcý.