Postcards from Tartu City Museum

published in Soviet times by the state publishing house Eesti Raamat, 1981

country views	Tartu - general views	Tartu - single buildings

Picture postcards came into use in 1894, and the first picture postcards in Estonia appeared as early as 1896.

At the turn of the century, picture postcards were mainly issued by bookshop owners who also acted as publishers. In Tartu, the writer Karl Eduard Sööt obtained a licence for opening a bookshop in 1894, and he founded a printing-house in 1895. In 1898 a book- and music-shop was established by Mihkel Hermann, the brother of the well-known Estonian composer and public figure Karl August Hermann, and in the same year a bookshop was opened by the proprietors of the newspaper "Postimees". In 1902 a printing-house and a bookshop were founded by Gustav Grenzstein. Konstantin Jaik, who started as an itinerant book-seller, became the proprietor of a bookshop in 1909.