Vintage 🥤 Unopened 1990s Coca‑Cola “Travel Refreshed” Postcard Set (NOS) – John Baeder Collection

Travel Refreshed? 🥤 Vintage 1990s Coca-Cola Postcard Set, John Baeder Collection, Unopened

Size: 6" x 4"

Long before interstates, fast food chains, and digital maps, American travel moved at a slower, more human pace. 🕰️ Roadside diners, hand‑painted signs, corner drugstores, and Coca‑Cola coolers weren't marketing, they were part of everyday life. This box is full of exactly that, and it's still in its shrink wrap.

📦 What's On It

A black box with the red Coca-Cola script up top and Postcards TRAVEL Refreshed COLLECTION™, the letters of TRAVEL each on their own little tile like an old roadside sign. The lid is a big sepia photo of a corner drugstore, the TONIMICUT name over the door, DRINK Coca-Cola on the sign, and two boards out front for LIGHT LUNCH and CLAM CHOWDER. Along the bottom it says Compiled from the Postcard Collection of John Baeder.

The back has five more of the old views, diners and roadside stands each with its own Coke sign, and an About John Baeder panel that says the original cards are circa 1920 to 1940. It calls Baeder a painter-poet and signs off on "an era of days gone by and an ice-cold Coca-Cola," which is about as good a sales line as I've ever read on a box.

These are sealed, so I can't count the cards inside. Collectors who've opened theirs list twelve postcards of six scenes, packed in a card-stock folder marked Marketed by Harrison Direct, Inc., Atlanta, GA, and the set is usually dated 1996.

🎨 John Baeder

John Baeder was born on Christmas Eve, 1938, in South Bend, Indiana. He started out as an advertising art director in Atlanta in 1960 and moved to New York in 1964. In the late 1960s he began collecting old postcards of roadside America, the diners, gas stations, campsites and motels, and in 1972 he left advertising to paint those places full time. His ad work had included Coca-Cola's own Fanta, Sprite and Tab. The break came when his friend, the painter John Kacere, told the gallerist Ivan Karp about four big "postcard paintings" of a diner, a gas station, a motel and a tourist camp. Karp came to the studio on February 13, 1972 and offered him a September show at OK Harris on the spot.

He became the painter of the American diner. His book Diners came out in 1978 with an introduction by the architectural historian Vincent Scully, followed by Gas, Food, and Lodging in 1982 and Sign Language: Street Signs as Folk Art in 1996. His paintings hang in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper-Hewitt and the Denver Art Museum, among many others, and he made his home in Nashville. The pictures in this box come straight out of his own postcard collection.

🥤 Coke on Every Corner

Coca-Cola's first painted wall sign went up in 1894 on the side of Young Brothers Pharmacy in Cartersville, Georgia, and for the next half century there were Coke signs on drugstores, diners and filling stations in just about every town in America. That's why they show up in nearly every one of these old cards. Nobody staged them. That's just how the street looked. Even the name on this box has history: "Travel Refreshed" headed a 1949 Coca-Cola ad, one of Haddon Sundblom's Santa paintings that ran on magazine back covers as the company's Christmas greeting.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1990s Coca-Cola Travel Refreshed Collection postcard box, compiled from the postcard collection of John Baeder
• Views from circa 1920-1940 postcards, sepia tones
• Factory sealed in its shrink wrap, New Old Stock
• Postcards 6" x 4"
• You'll get one sealed box like the ones shown

🖼️ Keep it sealed on a shelf with your Coca-Cola collection, or open it up and frame a row of those old diners in the kitchen. Either way it's a great gift for anybody who loves Coke, diners or the old two-lane roads.