Please help with the Chief Bender Death card
 

does anyone have information on this piece? i purchased it, but have no info or history on it.


http://i.ebayimg.com/t/CHARLES-ALBER...uM!~~60_57.JPG

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/CHARLES-ALBER...j+g~~60_57.JPG

Fantasy piece -- The font at top left ("INDIAN AGENCY") seems to be Candara, which was created in 2007 and I think comes as part of Windows Vista. The other printed type looks like Times, freshly printed. Swastikas are all wrong, too, those went out of style on postcards by the 1930s or earlier. The old one-cent blank stock is probably real!

David

Could be wrong, but I think the swastikas are facing the wrong way.

Historically, swastikas were drawn in both left facing and right facing designs. It's been used in religion, specifically Indian relgions such as Hinduism, for thousands of years. The symbol means 'to be good', but was sometimes viewed as 'good luck'. There are plenty of archaeological examples of the swastika pointing in both directions, many times in the same piece of artwork, such as a tiled floor. When the Nazi party adopted the symbol around 1920, they used a right facing swastika and for most in the Western world, the meaning and symbolism changed to hatred and disgust.

Do we all agree it is a Fantasy piece and not original to the stated time period?

You are absolutely correct on the history of the swastika, but as of 1954, its association with Nazi Germany was still so strong that it would have never been used in a piece of formal correspondence for a government agency.

In addition to the huge issue of the fonts, I also don't like, as best as I can tell, the halftone photo. I would expect it to have a wider dot pattern for that period. I think the conclusion that it is a fantasy piece and not of the period is correct.

Totally agree. I forgot to actually comment on the Chief Bender piece. I agree it's probably a fantasy piece. Why would a death notice use a baseball card photograph anyway? That seemed a little odd to me, but then again, I'm not an expert on death notices.

I'll add that while the font screams out "post-2000", I used a handy tool to get to its name: Identifont
http://www.identifont.com/
Which lets you answer a number of questions about a font's appearance and then magically tells you its name. It's kind of amazing, even from a small sample like this Bender piece.

Very cool tool, though it tells me the font is Brix Slab (though it looks nothing alike). I'm not sure that tool has all fonts of all types every made - I don't think you can use it as evidence it is a new font.

re: Bender
 

Yet it is Candara, and Candara was introduced in 2007.
http://www.cufonfonts.com/en/font/12050/candara
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candara