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METRA POSTCARD SHOW Yellowstone Park items lure buyers By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau When Ed Rothfuss retired from the National Park Service and he and his wife, Marge, decided to start a used-book store in Kalispell specializing in national park books, maps and other items, they didn't get much encouragement from fellow book dealers. "Other book dealers said national parks won't sell - people aren't interested in national park material," Ed Rothfuss recalled Saturday while watching over his booth at the National Parks Postcard and Paper Show, which continues today at MetraPark's Montana Pavilion. It didn't take long for the couple to realize that the free advice they received was worth its price and nothing more. Indeed, people are interested in national parks, especially Yellowstone, and are willing to pay for antique postcards, books, maps, photographs and almost anything else that strengthens their love affair with America's national parks. "We're seeing more and more interest, and there's a tremendous interest in Yellowstone," Rothfuss said. "Some of the parks have a tremendous following of people." Few at the weekend show, held as part of Huff's Antique Show and Sale, would have argued that point. Helena postcard dealer Tom Mulvaney said that within a few hours of the show's opening on Friday morning he had sold more than a half-dozen postcards for more than $100 each to a collector looking to fill holes in his collection. Rothfuss pointed to a half-empty shelf of Yellowstone books that had been full when the show began. "It's been a tremendous show so far - we're seeing lots of interested people and that's lots of fun," Mulvaney said. It has also drawn other specialized collectors such as Augie Bentz of Billings, who collects postcards of Billings sights from motels to Polytechnic Institute, now Rocky Mountain College. He has between 1,000 to 1,100 different cards, he said. The annual national park show moved from Bozeman to Billings this year. This year's show was also the first since online auction houses such as eBay have exploded onto the Internet, drawing many collectibles into the market while also driving up prices through increased competition. Since December, the number of Yellowstone items for sale on eBay has risen from about 200 to nearly 500, according to The Yellowstone Postcard Exchange, a newsletter for Yellowstone collectors. Memorabilia ranging from park postcards to the antique keys from park lodges and hotels now sells for 10 to 15 times the prices of just a few years ago. "For Yellowstone, it's really changed the collecting world," said M.A. Bellingham of Billings, who sometimes watches as an online spectator while collectors from around the world bid up prices in the final minutes of eBay auctions. By building demand for items that not long ago would have fetched only a few dollars, Internet auction houses have also drawn many more collectibles out of dusty attics and onto the public market. Collectors who have been searching for certain rare postcards for years have found them in a matter of weeks or months on eBay. "Just when you think you'll never find it, three of them come up on eBay," Bellingham said. The expanding ranks of Yellowstone collectors and sellers led Lee Whittlesey, Yellowstone's official archivist, to bring surplus items from the park's library collection to the Billings show in hopes of trading some for hard-to-find books or pamphlets now missing from the park library. Some feared that the Internet's global market might discourage people from attending shows like the one in Billings this weekend, but that has not happened yet. There's still a lot to be said for gatherings where collectors can pick up and hold a yellowed picture postcard showing Yellowstone's Fountain Hotel, which no longer exists, and read a message scrawled with a fountain pen by a Yellowstone tourist nearly a century ago. "It's real history," Mulvaney said. "There will never be a substitute for that."
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