I just read something on
Postcrossing today that was pretty timely for the post I'd already been planning to make: on the radio in Germany, some guy said that the postcard is dead. Postcrossers are now
sending him postcards from around the world to show that people do, indeed, still mail them. I don't know if it particularly proves the point, since they will be coming from a specialty site, but I'd have to agree that the postcard is definitely not dead.
My mother-in-law sent us a postcard from her trip to France. My kids sent us postcards from Hawaii. Maybe we don't use them much for general correspondence anymore, but they are still the way to send a little souvenir from a trip. Did you send anyone a postcard from your last vacation? Or pick up a couple to keep for yourself as mementos?
As I said, that happens to tie in with what I was already planning to write about, which is other people's postcards. I've never been terribly interested in them. I know there are plenty of folks who collect old letters or postcards, but it's never really grabbed me. Recently at a couple of estate sales, though, I picked up some used postcards just because I liked the images on the front and in some cases, the stamps. I'm not going to collect them, though; I'm going to repurpose them in some way. Heresy, I'm sure.
But I can preserve them digitally at least.
Here's one sent from Rome:
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| At first, I didn't even think this was in English. |
People's handwriting has changed so much from ... whenever this was. I can't find a year on the postmark. (
Edited to say: I see that under the postmark, the author of the card has the date written - Nov. 20, 1938) As I said in the caption above, I didn't think it was written in English, but now I can make out that the last few words are: "is his girl." It just takes practice to read this style of handwriting - I have the same problem when I'm looking at old records on ancestry.com. Maybe eventually I'll be able to decipher this one.
Just for fun, I looked up the address it was going to on Google Street View.
I couldn't find any interior shots for this particular building, but Googling the address and looking at images brought up the interiors of a few apartments on the same block, and they look nice. It occurs to me that it would be interesting to find some sent locally and do a then-and-now comparison of the addresses. So many project ideas, so little time.
And as an aside to the topic, did you know that I blog all the postcards I receive from Postcrossing on
my art-and-everything-else blog? Well, now you do.
