Walt Disney World
A History in Postcards
Chapter 4 Early Postcard Booklets Page 1: Judging a Book by its' Cover

In addition to the standard size chromes lining the postcard racks in the parks early days. There were also some special cards you could find around the WDW resort. Postcard booklets are one category of these. They came in sets of eight dedicated to one particular land, resort, or even individual attraction, and not only do you get the eight postcards but each of the cards (except the cover) comes with a stub that has the image of the card on it. In fact, at the initial writing of this page, in the case of the Fort Wilderness booklet (0111-0074) the only images I have of its' cards are are the stubs, therefore I don't know what was on the cover, and since they are un stapled I don't know the order . In another case, The Polynesian Resort (0111-0073), I only have seven loose cards from the interior of the booklet , so again I don't know the order, but I have been able to figure out what was on the cover, more on that later. In the first two series of booklets all of the cards in the booklet had the same number. (Except for one, more on that later too). In later series the number had a letter added to it (A through H) to differentiate the various cards in the booklet.

The earliest postcard booklets are :

You may notice that there is no booklet number 0111-0076. I think it is likely that is where Tomorrowland fell is the sequence. What I don't know is; is that booklet just one I have not found yet? Or, was the number reserved for a Tomorrowland booklet that possibly never made it to press? According to a copy of the Chapter on Walt Disney World from the La Roque/Farago checklist that I have seen it was indeed issued but pulled from circulation in 1976. I had no reason to dispute this when I started this site, but in the years I have had this site I have been in contact with a large number of Disney postcard collectors, this is a frequent thing to try and compare notes on , and as far as I can tell no one has it... perhaps this was a mistake, one can imagine Mr LaRoque or Farago at the park looking for cards and asking around for the Tomorrowland booklet, perhaps a cast memeber atempting to be helpful simply miss-recalled that that point thinking that there had been one when perhaps there simply was not. Of course it is possible that it was produced but just not too many of those booklets sold, since there were not many attractions open in Tomorrowland during that period and so the views probably weren't that compelling. One other interesting note from that checklist... it says that all these booklets were available from the time when the park first opened, and this was obviously not true for the Pirates of the Caribbean booklet, since it did not oen until 1973.

Booklet number 0111-0069 breaks a few of the rules the other booklets follow instead of all of the cards in the booklet having the same number, each card has a different number, and is actually the cover picture from the booklet whose number it has. It was this booklet that let me figure out which of the Polynesian Resort postcards was the cover to that booklet. The fact that Tomorrowland is the only land not represented in the booklet makes me suspect that, yes indeed, no Tomorrowland booklet ended up be printed in this first series. This may also help to pin down the dates of release in the books in this series. The Pirates of the Caribbean is the focus of the last booklet in this series and it opened in 1973. Now, you could figure that since the Pirates of the Caribbean booklet has the highest number in the series other booklets in the series may have came out sooner, but there are other attractions featured in these booklets that were not present opening Day according to Disney A to Z 2nd edition the Fort Wilderness Railway did not open until 1973. Also the Swan boats were not an opening day attraction. The clincher for proving that it is likely that none of these booklets came out until 1973 though would have to be the photo of the riverboat that is on both the cover of the Frontierland booklet and in the interior of the Magic Kingdom booklet you see, the boat pictured is the Richard F Irvine, which did not make it's debut until May 20, 1973. I would imagine that these books continued to be produced for a few years, until the next series of booklets came out in the late 70's



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