Emeritus professor collects images of university history

Here are sheep grazing about 100 yards from Agricultural Hall, and there are young elm trees in front of what is now Old Education, and, oh, here is the original – and very beautiful – law school building on Bascom Hill.

You can take quite a trip through UW–Madison history by looking at the postcard collection of Herbert Kliebard, professor emeritus in the School of Education. Since the 1960s, he’s been collecting historical postcards of Madison and the university, most of them dating between 1905 and the 1920s.

“Around 1905, Congress passed a law permitting the mailing of picture postcards by individuals,” says Kliebard, and that law unleashed a postal torrent that continues today. (The only postcards legal before that year were advertisements.)

Many of Kliebard’s postcards were produced by Madison photographer William J. Meuer. They were either lithographs (some of them hand-colored) or what Kliebard and other collectors call “real photos,” printed directly on postcard stock.

You’ve probably never seen some of Kliebard’s scenes, such as the Lincoln statue in front of Bascom Hall when Abe was looking quite uncorroded as a bronze; women wearing brush-the-ground dresses crossing a “rustic bridge” on University Drive that has graceful bent-wood railings; freshmen barking at the moon and pushing peanuts on the ground with their noses as hazing rituals; and an aerial view of old Camp Randall shot soon after aerials became possible.

Herbert Kliebard

Kliebard started collecting by looking for “ephemera” dealers at antique shows who sell paper items. “But now, the Internet has revolutionized collecting,” he says. “I can go to the ebay site (www.ebay.com) and do a search through a million collectibles on any given day.”

“I’ve collected these postcards because it’s fun,” he says, “and in the process I learn more about the university’s history.” His joy in photography has been lifelong: As a child he would blacken his home’s bathroom window so he could develop his own film.

And he puts his photographic passion into play today as an author. For his new book on the history of vocational education, for example, he supplied all of the photos. Kliebard found many of them in the Library of Congress and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin by using – no surprise – the sharp-eyed instincts of a collector.