A Brief Introduction to “Sunday Travels”
This series on The Netherlands is the first in an ongoing weekly series that will focus on various travel stereoviews. My wife has “encouraged” me to thin out the boxes upon boxes I have lying about. Boxes of stereoscopic treasures which happen to be cluttering up our microscopic smallish Brooklyn shoebox flat. Thus, I’ve begun looking through what I actually have. What I have, admittedly, is too much stuff. So I’ve begun a boot sale page here on the site, to offer this stuff up to readers before listing it on eBay.
But while digging, I’ve found a lot of pretty great cards. Not cards that I necessarily need, or even intend to keep, but great views nonetheless. And disproportionately, these are travel cards. I know people in the collecting community who exclusively collect rare views of a certain country, or from a certain manufacturer. My collecting interests, however, are primarily in Great War stereography, European-style glass views, and obscure formats – primarily Raumbild and VistaScreen. Therefore, the ones that I’m going to sell off that are interesting enough to post will be posted as “Sunday Travels”. I’m going to try to feature a different country or region each month.
General Views of The Netherlands
This month, in response to the decidedly Amsterdam-centric “Holland” series by Raumbild, I’m featuring a collection which actually portrays the Netherlands – not just one city from the region of Holland. For some reason, the Raumbild post went viral. (Here I should give a shout-out to a Dutch correspondent of mine, AndrĂ© Ruiter, who is an excellent photographer as well as a fellow stereography enthusiast. He is one of several people who agreed with me on the silliness of naming a set shot in one city being named after an entire region. Plus, he has excellent work up himself. Go check out his site!)
Of the two-dozen or so Netherlands views that I liked, some appeared to entirely lack context. They’re all from Keystone, so there is probably some (1890s-1920s) veracity to most of what they say. However, they don’t mention particular cities, particular subjects, etc. The verso text gives away nothing, besides that these were taken in The Netherlands, or in the Holland region of the country. Nevertheless, there’s good information here. And they’re nice views in any case! But let’s let the cards do the talking:
General Views of The Netherlands, by Keystone View Company










So we are given a glimpse of The Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. While not as immediate as Raumbild’s “Holland” series, these cards are more impressive overall – and actually representative of the topic at hand. In the next few weeks, we’ll get into a number of more specific areas. First, Rotterdam. Then Delft, The Hague, and areas surrounding them. And finally, of course, we’ll look at Amsterdam and what are effectively its “suburbs”. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
General Views of The Netherlands as Anaglyphs
These have been added to the “Travel Stereoviews” section of the boot sale page.
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