Philip (one l!) Hunter Moore was a postcard photographer and publisher who was active from at least 1907 to the early 1920s. He primarily photographed the Philadelphia Main Line, where I grew up, and his post-fin de siècle images of familiar places in Bryn Mawr, Ardmore, Haverford, Narberth and other Montgomery and Delaware County towns have become dear to me. There were tons of postcard photographers working all over the country at the height of deltiological popularity and it’s a little bit upsetting that there are no vast indices or exhaustive registers of their work.

So I decided to catalog PHM’s output. He had both skip-numbered (ranging from 101-1225) and unnumbered postcards totaling at least 706 cards. He worked mainly in the Philadelphia suburbs, although evidently he photographed at least a few sights in Marblehead, Mass. and Claymont, Delaware.  Here is my spreadsheet, which I update continuously as I get new cards or new information. I’m also interested in his biography – I don’t know much except that his studios were in Media and then Germantown, the latter of which was probably shared with the Pelham Stationery Store, for which he also  produced postcards. I suspect his father was Christian Moore, a druggist who owned Moore’s Pharmacies in Bryn Mawr and Media. If so, his brother would have been Christian Earl Moore, a Princeton grad who became a banker, and his mother  Jennie Larimer Hagy Moore.

Please: if you can help fill in the catalog of his work, if you want to send or sell me postcards or if you know more about his life, email me at litwack@gmail.com. This has become a serious obsession, and I mean to follow it to the end. My thanks to Jerry Francis of the Lower Merion Historical Society, Roger A. McCain, and Keith Lockhart for their kind help.