L. L. Cook Co. and the Postcards of Mid-Century America

The L. L. Cook Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin was one of the largest American postcard publishers of the mid-20th century. Its photographers traveled widely, documenting downtown streets, hotels, restaurants, resorts, schools, hospitals, tourist attractions, parks, highways, industrial sites, and thousands of other places across the United States.

For collectors, Cook is particularly interesting because the company continued producing genuine real photo postcards long after the format's early 20th-century heyday. A black-and-white Cook card from the 1940s or even early 1950s may still be an actual photographic print rather than a mechanically printed postcard. At the same time, Cook's catalog eventually expanded into the color cards that came to dominate the postcard market after World War II.

The company therefore sits at an interesting point in postcard history, bridging the classic photographic postcard and the chrome era that followed.

Lloyd L. Cook and the beginning of the company

Lloyd Lewis Cook was born in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, in 1887. Before establishing the company that carried his name, he was involved with Harris P. Montgomery in the Cook Montgomery Company of Minneapolis, commonly known as Co-Mo Photo, around 1917 or 1918.

There is a small discrepancy in the surviving institutional histories over exactly when the L. L. Cook Company began. The Texas State Archives traces Cook's independent Wisconsin operation to 1921, after he left Cook Montgomery. The Wisconsin Historical Society identifies the L. L. Cook Company as having been founded in Milwaukee in 1925 by Cook, Sigurd H. Arneson, and Carl A. Zimmer.

The two dates may represent different stages in the development of the business, but the available records do not make that distinction entirely clear. Cook postcards from the company's early years may list either Lake Mills or Milwaukee as the firm's address.

What is clear is that by the 1920s Cook was building a substantial photographic publishing operation. The company manufactured and distributed photographic postcards and greeting cards, eventually becoming one of Milwaukee's two dominant postcard firms alongside the E. C. Kropp Company.

Photographing America for the postcard rack

Cook's business model depended on creating a huge catalog of local views.

The familiar postcard rack at a drugstore, hotel, restaurant, tourist attraction, or roadside shop needed images that felt specific to the place where the cards were sold. That required photographers to travel from community to community making photographs that could be turned into locally marketable postcards.

The resulting Cook catalog is remarkably broad.

A company photographer might photograph a courthouse and high school in one town, a motel and restaurant in another, then continue down the highway to photograph a state park, roadside attraction, dam, hospital, or resort.

This was not limited to Wisconsin or even the Midwest. Cook postcards survive from communities across the United States. The Texas State Archives alone holds a company collection documenting 105 Texas towns, including places such as Brownsville, Del Rio, El Paso, Kilgore, Kingsville, McAllen, Mission, and Bandera.

The Library of Congress preserves Cook material depicting tourist attractions, restaurants, motels, recreational facilities, boat liveries, yacht clubs, and other roadside subjects. Other institutional collections contain Cook views from Florida, California, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and throughout the Upper Midwest.

Seen together, these cards amount to an enormous photographic survey of mid-century America.

The ordinary places became the interesting ones

Cook photographed plenty of conventional tourist scenery, but the company's most compelling images today are often the subjects that probably seemed completely ordinary when they were made.

A small-town drugstore with Coca-Cola signs, a roadside motel with automobiles parked outside, a restaurant dining room, a gas station, bowling alley, hospital, high school, hunting lodge, or neighborhood shopping district might have been photographed simply because the proprietor wanted postcards to sell or distribute.

Decades later, the building may be gone and the business forgotten.

A 1936 Cook photograph of Hales Corners, Wisconsin, for example, shows an IGA grocery store, filling station, Dodge dealership, tavern, parked automobiles, gas pumps, bicycles, and pedestrians. The original subject was simply a town street. Today the smaller details make the photograph a much richer historical record.

Cook also photographed interiors with surprising frequency. Dining rooms, hotel lobbies, churches, stores, resorts, and other commercial spaces appear throughout the surviving archive. Interior RPPCs can be especially appealing because relatively few photographers documented these spaces compared with exterior streets and buildings.

A commercial RPPC well into the 1940s and 1950s

One of the most interesting things about L. L. Cook postcards is how late the company continued using the real photo process.

The RPPC is often associated with the period from about 1905 through the 1920s, when local photographers produced postcard-sized photographs of small towns and everyday life. Cook demonstrates that commercial real photo postcard production continued much later.

The Library of Congress preserves a Cook postcard from 1944 showing sailors forming an American flag at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois. The institution identifies the object specifically as a gelatin silver photograph in postcard format.

Wisconsin Historical Society examples from the 1940s are likewise cataloged as real photo postcards printed on EKC photographic paper. Cook RPPCs with postmarks extending into the early 1950s are also readily documented.

These were not necessarily tiny local print runs. Cook operated as a large commercial company, and a popular view could be produced in substantial quantities.

That makes Cook an important reminder that RPPC describes how the card was made, not how rare it is.

A photographic postcard can be both a genuine silver gelatin print and a mass-market commercial product.

Identifying L. L. Cook real photo postcards

Classic Cook RPPCs are usually black-and-white photographs approximately 3½ by 5½ inches. The image often carries a title and a Cook catalog number, while the reverse may read something similar to:

All Rights Reserved - The L. L. Cook Co., Milwaukee

Many examples from the 1930s and 1940s were printed on EKC photographic postcard stock. Under magnification, these cards should display continuous photographic tones rather than the dot pattern of a halftone or lithographic reproduction.

Cook used numerous numbering systems. Cards may carry numbers accompanied by letters such as B, C, D, E, H, L, or other prefixes and suffixes. These can be useful when comparing cards, but I would not use the number alone to assign a date.

The company also reissued subjects and produced multiple versions of some views. The Wisconsin Historical Society finding aid specifically notes that multiple versions of individual postcards survive within the Cook archive.

As always, the physical card, photographic paper, automobiles, architecture, postmark, signs, and other visible evidence are more useful when considered together.

The Cook archive

A substantial portion of the company's photographic work survives at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The L. L. Cook Company Photographs collection contains 3,555 photographs and 2,140 negatives, providing a rare opportunity to compare published postcards with the photographic material used to produce them.

The collection is dated from 1898 through approximately 1965, even though the company itself was established later. This earlier date likely reflects photographic material that eventually became part of the company's working archive, rather than evidence that L. L. Cook Company was operating in 1898.

The surviving photographs include Wisconsin communities, businesses, tourist destinations, resorts, roads, architecture, and commercial interiors.

The Library of Congress also holds approximately 600 Cook postcards in three albums identified as Series C through E, deposited through the U.S. Copyright Office in 1958.

The existence of these archives is especially useful for collectors because an otherwise obscure Cook postcard may be identifiable through an institutional copy or related negative.

Roadside America

Cook's peak years coincided with the enormous expansion of automobile travel.

By the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, American tourism increasingly revolved around highways rather than railroads. New motels, motor courts, restaurants, filling stations, state parks, roadside attractions, and vacation resorts sprang up to serve motorists.

Cook documented this landscape extensively.

These cards preserve neon signs, cabin courts, swimming pools, supper clubs, golf courses, fishing resorts, roadside parks, lodge interiors, and businesses designed specifically for travelers arriving by automobile.

For collectors of roadside architecture, Route 66 culture, motels, restaurants, neon, automobiles, and regional tourism, Cook can be an exceptionally productive publisher to search.

The strength of these cards is often in the specificity. A generic mountain landscape may survive in hundreds of versions from multiple publishers. There may be only one postcard showing a particular family-owned motel before its sign was replaced and the highway rerouted around town.

Military and wartime postcards

World War II created another significant market for Cook.

Military bases were full of young servicemen and women writing home, and postcards provided an inexpensive way to show family members where they were stationed.

Cook photographed training bases, barracks, naval facilities, aircraft, formations, and military buildings. The 1944 Great Lakes Naval Training Station flag formation is one surviving example.

These cards can range from common base views to much more interesting occupational and military subjects. Identifiable aircraft, ships, units, specialized equipment, or unusual training activities deserve closer attention than ordinary administration buildings.

The Cook name itself is less important than what the image documents.

Native American subjects

Cook also published photographs of Native American people and tourist attractions associated with Indigenous imagery.

The Library of Congress holds Cook photographs among a larger collection of Seminole and Cherokee portraits, while the National Museum of African American History and Culture catalogs a 1930s Cook postcard from Knollwood Groves in Lake Worth, Florida.

As with other commercial postcard publishers, period titles can be incomplete, generalized, or shaped by tourist marketing rather than by accurate cultural identification.

These cards deserve careful research. When possible, collectors should identify the individual, tribal affiliation, location, photographer, and circumstances surrounding the photograph rather than relying solely on the wording printed on the postcard.

A clearly identified person or event can transform an otherwise generic dealer listing into a historically meaningful object.

The move into color

Cook adapted as postcard tastes changed after World War II.

Black-and-white real photo cards gradually gave way to commercially printed color postcards made from Kodachrome and Ektachrome transparencies. Cook backs from the 1950s and 1960s commonly include wording such as From a Natural Color Transparency or From an Ektachrome Transparency.

These are important distinctions.

The original photograph may have been made on color transparency film, but the postcard itself is generally a mechanically printed reproduction. It should not be classified as an RPPC simply because it originated with a photograph.

The change in format mirrored the larger postcard industry. Travelers increasingly expected bright color photographs, larger cards, glossy surfaces, and modern typography.

Cook's catalog consequently provides an interesting before-and-after record. The same hotel, park, college campus, or tourist attraction may appear first as a black-and-white RPPC and later as a color card.

Buying E. C. Kropp

In 1956, L. L. Cook acquired its longtime Milwaukee competitor, the E. C. Kropp Company.

Kropp had been producing postcards since the beginning of the 20th century and was itself one of the country's important postcard publishers and printers. By purchasing Kropp, Cook brought together Milwaukee's two largest postcard operations.

The acquisition creates another identification wrinkle for collectors.

Post-acquisition cards can contain both company names. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee records, for example, identify a color card with L. L. Cook Co. as publisher and E. C. Kropp Co. as printer.

A Kropp name on a later card therefore does not necessarily mean that it predates the 1956 sale.

The acquisition also gave Cook access to another enormous catalog of images and commercial relationships. Determining whether a particular later card originated with Cook or Kropp may require comparing earlier editions.

The end of the postcard company

Cook continued producing postcards through the 1960s.

In 1969, the business was sold to the General Aniline & Film Corporation, better known as GAF. The company's emphasis shifted away from postcard publishing and toward photofinishing.

The L. L. Cook Company formally dissolved in 1980.

Lloyd Cook did not live to see the final dissolution. He died in 1972 at age 84.

By then, the company that carried his name had spent decades photographing and distributing views from communities throughout the country.

Notes and market conditions from Northwest Postcards

L. L. Cook postcards are generally common.

The company's enormous output means that the Cook name itself adds little value to an ordinary card. Common scenic views, schools, public buildings, resorts, and later color cards often appear in the $5 to $15 range, and many can be found for less.

The interesting cards are the ones where the subject breaks out of the normal postcard market.

A Cook RPPC showing a railroad depot, mine, logging operation, unusual industrial facility, small-town commercial block, roadside motel, gas station, restaurant interior, early shopping center, automobile dealership, military activity, or identifiable vanished business can attract a much stronger audience.

A particularly good example is the Cook photograph of the railroad depot at Dickens, Iowa. Current dealer pricing for that card reaches well beyond ordinary Cook values, not because L. L. Cook is rare, but because the card combines a small Iowa community with a clearly identified Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad station.

That is the collector lesson with Cook.

Do not price the publisher. Price the photograph.

A $5 Cook card and a $50 Cook card may have identical backs and have been produced in the same year. The difference is usually what appears on the front.

I would pay particular attention to readable signs. Motels, restaurants, drugstores, filling stations, movie theaters, taverns, dealerships, and other named businesses can attract collectors searching for a specific company or town. Interior views deserve similar attention because they are less common and can contain advertising, furnishings, architecture, and other secondary details.

Condition remains important, but a scarce subject can tolerate considerably more wear than a common scenic view. Minor corner wear or writing on the reverse bothers me much less when the card records a business or place that I cannot find on another postcard.

Collector's perspective

Cook postcards are easy to overlook because there are so many of them.

That may be exactly why they are worth studying.

The company's photographers arrived after the first great RPPC boom, when America was becoming more mobile, more commercial, and increasingly organized around the automobile. They photographed the places created by that transformation.

The result is less romantic than the classic 1910 small-town RPPC, but often just as historically useful.

Cook shows us the motel where a family stopped for the night, the supper club where they ate dinner, the new hospital at the edge of town, the service station beside the highway, the college dormitory, the fishing resort, the bowling alley, and the Main Street businesses that were still there when the photographer drove through.

And because Cook continued using photographic postcard paper so late, many of those scenes survive with the clarity and detail of a genuine photographic print.

The company may be common.

The places it photographed are disappearing.

That is where the collecting opportunity is.

Additional reading

• "L.L. Cook Company Photographs, 1898-circa 1965", Wisconsin Historical Society.
• "L.L. Cook Company Collection", Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
• "Greetings from Milwaukee", University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.
• "The L.L. Cook Company Post Cards, Milwaukee, Wisconsin", Library of Congress.
• "Flag Formation by Sailors at U.S. Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, Ill.", Library of Congress.
• "Lake Weyauwega", Wisconsin Historical Society.

Example postcards