The book Raphael Kirchner and his postcards sum up the status of our research on the work of Kirchner in the postcard scenery at 1996, the date of issue of the book.
During his lifetime Kirchner was one of he most prolific illustrators of picture postcards. To date nearly eight hundred postcards of diverse subjects designed by him have been discovered, and this book is first of all the result of our work in cataloguing these postcards.
All the Kirchner's postcards have been subdivided in homogeneous groups, and we thought it opportune to divide them into three main periods: the Beginnings (those postcards printed between 1897-1899), the Golden Age (1990-1907), the Glamour Age (1910 and after).
Then, each set is catalogued with a letter plus number combination (for example, D.8 - "Geisha"): the letter denotes the group in which the set is enclosed (D = The Golden Age - Signed Raphael Kirchner), the number (8) shows the progression of the set inside the group (for each group the numbering starts from 1). In the checklist the first data: list number, title, number of cards, issue date and when necessary a brief description of the postcards, give the beginnings to the main catalogue of all Kirchner's postcards. For a collector of artist's postcards, this information is all that is necessary in order to know the works of Kirchner.

But a collector specialised in Kirchner's postcards is also interested in knowing each Type in which the same image has been published, when it is the case. Moreover, if his interest in Kirchner's postcards is very deep, he can find in the list al the all the issues of each set, with the different publishers and/or printers, the particular issues with greeting overprints, and rare Variants of some postcards, usually used as advertising cards.
Finally, in order to complete the description of each set, very often we have added some Notes with information both on the use of the postcard images for different graphic subjects (such as menus, book illustrations, etc.) and on events that inspired some sets.

In his 230 pages, size 24 x 17 cm, the book Raphael Kirchner and his postcards includes, in addition to the checklist of the all known postcards by Kirchner, a long and detailed introduction on his life and works, a rich Bibliography and some very useful indexes of the sets for publishers, of the titles of sets or single postcards, of the inscriptions and overprints. Moreover, a section of the book is reserved to the quotations of the catalogued postcards. For each set we propose a "quotation index", which depends on the rarity of the postcard, on collectors' demand for any particular set, and on the general trend of the market. The quotation indexes are then transformed into local currency, taking into account the exchange rate at the publishing time of the book: sorry, there are no transformations in Euros, but nowadays you can take the quotations in US dollars as equivalent to Euros and internationally good.