On 1 Nov. 1886 Liersch left the partnership. He opened a competing business, Gustav Liersch & Co, an art publisher, on 1 Jan. 1887. Around 1890, Otto Grützmacher joined the firm as a partner. Liersch resigned from the firm in 1896, with his brother Carl, a long-time employee, remaining to take over business trips.
Grützmacher continuted to operate the firm, solely, through the early 1910's. Around 1912, Siegfried Danziger joined the firm, working with Grützmacher for several years. Circa 1917, ownership passed solely to Danziger, with the last tracing for the firm appearing in a 1931 business directory, again with Danziger as owner.
Early Erche & Liersch, as well as Gustav Liersch issues, included cabinet and stereoscopic cards. Beginning around 1900, Gustav Liersch began issuing picture postcards, particularly portraits of the royal family and also general interest cards. It is this general interest group that is presented in this catalog.
The file names beneath the cards provide the series number as well as the subject's name, where known; or a descriptive name where the name is not known. In addition, a few keywords have been added to the file names (e.g., Dogs, Cats, Calendar Card). Cards may be selected for both the names and the keywords using the Search button. Only one sample card is provided for each series.
There is extensive visual overlap of Gustav Liersch cards with Rotophot cards; however, there are minimal instances (if any) of the exact same series being issued by both RPH and Liersch.
Models appearing on GLCo's cards overlap significantly with the models appearing on those released by Rotophot. Rotophot's cards have been cataloged in the archive section of the Ross Verlag postcards site. During that cataloging, descriptive names were assigned to commonly appearing models where their name was not known. Where the same model appears here, the descriptive name is included in the file name (e.g.,Butterfly Dress Woman, Side Profile Woman, Bundled Up Girl).
As with the Rotophot cards, there is evidence of the presence of Ernst Schneider's photographs in the GLCo catalog. For example, magazines such as Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig, Die Woche, and The Sketch all included photos matching GLCo postcards that were credited to Schneider. Several samples have been included in the catalog.
These images were gathered by Jean Ritsema (j_ritsema@msn.com) who would welcome information or suggestions from collectors of the cards.