Event

Leonard Pitt PARIS POSTCARDS Berkeley Arts @ Letters and Hillside Club

Leonard Pitt's PARIS POSTCARDS is a stunning volume of historical postcards featuring the City of Light that takes readers deep into the art and heart of the postcard and of Paris itself.

The invention of the postcard in the nineteenth century revolutionized communication and created the original social networking tool: At the height of their popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France was producing a million postcards a day, and collecting became a craze that spread around the world.

The postcards collected here reveal the true artwork of the original medium, from hand-tinting techniques to nostalgic details too small to see with the naked eye: sandwich-board men asleep on park benches, a cheese vendor eyeing a female passerby. The messages penned to loved ones back home are perhaps the most delightful gems. In its colorful entirety, PARIS POSTCARDS creates an enduring time capsule of Paris in the early twentieth century.

Leonard Pitt is an actor and author. He has written two books on Paris: Walks Through Lost Paris and Paris: Un Voyage dans le Temps, plus A Small Moment of Great Illumination, about the life of the seventeenth century Irish healer Valentine Greatrakes. He has performed and taught throughout the U.S. and Europe, and lives in Berkeley, California.

7:30 PM Saturday, October 17, 2009
Hillside Club and Berkeley Arts & Letters
2286 Cedar Street at Arch, Berkeley
$12 advance ($6/HSC members, students with ID advance)/$15 door