Postcards From The Edge Of Atomic War

We posted a few postcards from the past last week and a reader with an unparalleled visual memory nailed one of the images as an artist's rendering of a photo he'd seen before. Below are the two side by side.

For larger images click here for the photo (and scroll right) and here for the postcard.

The postcard (on the right) shows a happy, funtime waterfront that looks like it could fit neatly into a kid's bathtub and, in fact, we noted in our post that we wanted to visit the idyllic world it portrayed, as a child if possible. In contrast, we pulled the original photograph (left) from a document entitled "The Seattle Civil Defense Manual." Tim Ellis posted that entire booklet to his website after a coworker found it in his garage and it's definitely worth a click-through.

Reuters has nothing on the visual artist behind this transformation. Can Reuters take you from the Greatest Generation sleeping one off while atomic bombs are so close you can hear them whistling to stickball in the street and ferries steaming leisurely around the Bay with a few strokes of the brush? We think not. Is there a Photoshop filter for 1950s-postcardifying a photograph? Because there should be.

All this skirts around the fact that the civil defense manual is too awesome for words and every sentence and every image must be savored.