Titanic postcard postmarked 4 days after sinking

Hi Ron, Unfortunately the ship pictured on you're card is not the Titanic, its one of the Cunard ships, probably the Mauretania. This is a common problem with pictures of the Titanic- a lot of them are either of her sister Olympic or one of the cunard sisters(Mauretania/Lusitania).
In any case good luck with you're auction.

Regards.
 
The vent cowlings tend to indicate that the ship is the Mauritania. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have a certain premium value. As Trevor indicated, the images of other ships were used quite frequently, and this was due to the fact that there weren't that many photos of the Titanic in circulation. With so few available, any four stacker would do, and few people would have been the wiser.
 
It's certainly Mauretania. You can even see Cunard's black bands on the funnels.

To me, it looks like the photo that was adapted to play the part of Carpathia. All sorts of antics went on soon after the sinking.

maurepathia_postcard.jpg
 
Not a very convincing hack job there, but as I indicated, precious few people outside the industry would have known the difference. Rivet counters like us who can tell the difference between sister ships on sight ( without looking at the name!) are very much the exception, not the rule.
 
This is the first time I've seen an attempt to pass Mauretania off as Titanic. I would have thought that it would have been more logical to have used a picture of Olympic instead, as there must have been plenty available. Usually, it was images of Lusitania that were passed off as her famous record-holding sister before WW1.

Lucy
 
I've seen a picture of German postcard marking the event of the sinking of the Lusitania in which they try to pass of a photo of the Titanic as the lost Lusi.

I think it was in Ballard's Exploring The Lusitania.
 
From Jeff Newman's collection on Great Ships, this page has another example of Mauretania being passed off as Titanic; look at the card in the third row. Not terribly uncommon; seems that any four-stacker could fit the bill.
 
Well,

There are a couple of ways of looking at it.

One could consider it of value if one thinks that since it has an image of the Lusitania or Mauretania on it, it is thus more unusal and rare.

The other way of thinking is that it is worth less because it is not even an accurate picture of Titanic.

Take your pic!

Steve Santini
 
I reckon $300 is a bit steep. Not that I really know what these things go for.

But since it's the Mauretania rather than the Titanic, I'm going to stick with my initial thought.

[Moderator's Note: This message and the two immediately above it, originally posted to the "Today on eBay" thread, have been moved to this pre-existing thread addressing the same postcard. MAB]
 

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