When did you last send a postcard?
With billions of us now using social media to connect with friends and family in real-time, who needs to bother with finding a pen, buying a stamp, and remembering to pop to the post box.
And yet what a wonderful feeling to find a postcard on the doormat. To receive a handwritten postcard from someone you love is to receive a gift. It’s just between the two of you (if we ignore the postman). The connection is exclusive, personal, meaningful.
With the advent of the picture postcard in the late 19th century, ordinary people could, for the first time, capture a precious memory of an important occasion or special place. They could hold these small pieces of art in their own hands and then display them in an album or on the mantelpiece.
Thirty years ago, I started my own postcard collection, decorating my room with a blu-tacked mosaic of postcards of Hollywood actors. It was a cheap way to add glamour to the dreary brutalist architecture of my student halls. I still have those postcards stuffed into a shoebox in the attic. Old friends are hard to lose.
And this, of course, is why there are still millions of vintage postcards circulating today, stuck into albums or hidden in shoeboxes like mine. All of them treasured as old friends.
To own a vintage postcard is to glimpse into a vibrant world long gone. With an old postcard in our hands, we can travel in time to a familiar place or hear the voices of our great grandparents as they share their daily lives. Isn’t that more valuable to us than the curated world of famous things in a grand museum or dusty archive?