Knife grinders are a vanishing craft. Doing this at home before electric knife sharpeners was difficult. Knife grinders would take their sharpening wheels from door to door and take care of the problem.
An earlier postcard view, before divided backs
One can see the rapid transformation of the postcard from a time when messages where only allowed on the front, as in this card.
This postcard was sent from Calcutta in April 1905 to Mr. H.G. Squier, "Actg. [Acting?] P. M. [Postmaster?], Manila, P.I. [Philippine Islands]": "4/28/05 Leave today overland by rail to Bombay. Lytton [sp?]."
This unnamed Rajah was a popular postcard subject, in color and black and white. Note how well the image was colorized during the half-tone printing process which had just started to become more widely used for postcards based on photographs.
This tomb to one of the most revered of Muslim religious teachers in Gujarat was completed in the late 15th century.
Clifton & Co., the first big Bobby-based publisher had numerous versions of this card. This keyhole-style view – a briefly popular postcard type – works well with the curve of what is now Marine Drive opening out towards the waters of Back Bay.
Postmarked Seapost Office [Bombay] April 1906, received in Manchester April 28, and addressed to Miss. L. Swill [sp?] in Manchester, England with this note on the front: "What price this for a couple."
Around the turn of the century, women of Bombay were on the cutting-edge of popular fashion, photographed in studio settings like this one and extensively postcarded.
The Mexican Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz has a nice description of coming upon the Taj Mohal Hotel by ship for the first time in the early 1950s: "Behind the monument [India Gate], floating in the warm air, was a silhouette of the Taj Mahal
Among the Paul Gerhardt postcards published by The Ravi Varma Press, this seems to be one of the rarer ones. Postally used in Glasgow, Scotland on Nov.
