PICTUREGOER was a real phenomenon! That British publishing company, located in London, started the production of fine memorabilia in 1921 and was active till 1960. The longest period of a memorabila producing publishing company worldwide!

Over 6500 different real photograph postcards on 2000 actors and actresses have been issued, also on singers, theatrical stars, pop stars and film scenes.

Even more popular than the card programme was the publishing of periodical film magazines, probably the most successful ones in history: Picturegoer Magazine or the following ones such as Film Weekly, Picture Show or Film Pictorial. They had wonderful covers of the most beloved celebrities and huge reports with excellent picture material. The company was so successful that they could even publish their mags on a weekly base.

Not only postcards and magazines established a good reputation for Picturegoer. They also produced nice supplements within the mags (kind of film programmes), annual film books or other nice memorabilia.

The postcards were issued in series, the first one, which ran to over 1400 cards, did not have any kind of prefix letter. Groups of several poses of the same star were sometimes published in this series and were identified with an alphabetical suffix (e.g. Greta Garbo had cards published numbered 600, 600a, 600b, 600c, 600d, 600e, 600f, 600g, 600h which depicted 9 different images of the star for example).

Subsequent series were given a prefix letter with the majority of images  being in sepia tone (e.g. "W" for those issued in the 1940's, "D" for the 1950's and "S" for the last series issued up to 1960).

The "K" series was devoted to cameo portraits and the "P" series to film partners(e.g. P208 Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor).

The "K" and "P" series were issued in b/w and coloured versions.The coloured versions were given the prefixes "KC" (for example KC8 as Garbo in the so called Cameo Series) and "PC" (for example PC17 as Garbo and Clark Gable) but the poses were identical to the b/w versions.

The "C" series, known as the Colourgraph Series (for example C81 as Garbo), was devoted entirely to handcoloured images.

The "FS" Series was related exclusively to film scenes.

Special sets of different cards were issued for specific films in the "D" & "W" Series.

Greta Garbo had a lot of covers regarding the magazines and got more than 140 postcards. So Picturegoer was the other big publishing company after ROSS (Berlin) producing the most Garbo cards.

The individual card numbers are only listed on the reverse side of each card. Also the company name can be seen there. The production took place in a gentle sepia brown and in light version.  The cards have the regular postcard size.

Picturegoer was the only publishing company which attached a special importance to the art of colorizing. As mentioned before, there are even small series dedicated to that art (Colourgraph, Cameo, Filmpartners).

After my research Picturegoer produced 148 different Garbo cards.

As you can see subsequently, we list all Picturegoer cards on one side, also the different series names such as Colourgraph, Famous Filmpartner Cards, Film Shots (= Film Weekly) and Filmkurier Series because they all do belong to one publishing company.

A few cards are still missing. So if you can help to complete our list by scanning some of the the outstanding ones, please be so kind as to do so. If you should have more informations about that company, write an email, would be great. Thank you.

Picturegoer. A great tradition. A huge array of products. And a big remembrance for Greta. Enjoy! Garbo forever!