North Bay Nugget e-edition

Postcards were the ‘instant messages’ of their day

ANDRE RAMSHAW

In the days before insta-everything and gurning for the ’Gram, there would plop through the mail slot a ray of sunshine — and the odd jolt of jealously — amid the bills and discount-dross flyers: a glossy missive with the grating refrain, “Wish you were here ...”

Increasingly shunned today, sitting forlorn in tatty tourist stalls if found at all, the vacation postcard was a poignant statement of affection — and a dose of humble-bragging to the homebound.

Its limitations, however, soon became obvious as the world got wired beginning in the 1990s. That postcard of you “having a ball in Havana” often arrived three days after your return to reality.

Now vacationers boast across social media channels such as Instragram and Facebook, posting polished selfies from the minute they touch down until the last sangria-soaked farewell.

But postcards were like the Whatsapp of their time, says the national Postal Museum in Britain — “short punchy messages accompanied by a picture.” It wasn’t quite instant communication, but with up to 12 collections and deliveries a day in large cities during the height of the postcard craze in the Edwardian era (roughly from 1900 to 1920), it was more like email correspondence than the modern-day “snail mail” stereotype.

First introduced in Canada in 1871, followed by the United States two years later, the officially issued postcard reached its peak in the early 1900s, with billions mailed every year. Conceived by Austrian economist Emanuel Herrmann in 1869, the cheap messaging system soon spread from Europe to the U.K. and then to North America. And unlike formal letters, it required only basic literacy skills, thus putting correspondence in to the hands of the masses.

As the British newspaper the Standard noted archly in 1899: “The illustrated postcard craze, like the influenza, has spread to these islands from the continent, where it has been raging with considerable severity.”

Though originally blank — with space only for an address and a few lines of pithy prose — the postcard evolved to become an artistic palette bound only by designers’ imaginations. From swaying-palm landscapes to royal visits and exhibitions, from humorous scenes to current events, the possibilities for the picture postcard were endless.

Postcards really came into their own during the First World War. An estimated six to seven billion were exchanged between soldiers and their loved ones — an average of nearly 1,000 per combatant. Sometimes all that was needed was a scrawled “OK.”

While its star has fallen, the postcard remains an object of fascination for collectors. For their part, the curators at the Postal Museum in Britain — albeit a bit biased — suggest the postcard could be ripe for the same kind of revival as that enjoyed by vinyl records.

“In a time when technology can both connect and isolate us,” they write, “we may look to classic forms of communication. The postcard is an emotive, tangible representation of affection.”

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2022-06-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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