Postcards

The likely ancestor to the postcard seems to be envelopes bearing printed pictures known as patriotic covers. Thousands of envelopes bearing patriotic pictures were mailed during the American Civil War (1861-1865). The first postcard in the US was printed by J. P. Carlton in 1861 and remained available until they were replaced in 1873 by US government postcards.


To look at the origin of the postcard, we have to go to Hungary. Dr. Emanuel Herrmann suggested the first postcard in 1869, and the Hungarian government accepted the design that same year. In 1870 the first regularly printed card appeared, a historical design, produced in connection with the Franco-German War. In 1872 the first advertising postcard appeared in Great Britain. In 1874 the first German card appeared, showing the Eiffel Tower. A decade later postcards would enter their heyday.

The history lesson is nice, but why am I giving you all the postcard trivia? Well, just the other day I made a trip to the post office. My goal was to send a manuscript in for consideration. To accomplish this goal I needed to buy a postcard that I could enclose so the publisher could confirm they’d received the manuscript (more important than you might think). I checked the racks of tape, envelopes, and boxes. I looked at the carousel of greeting cards. I even looked among the commemorative stamps and first-day-covers, but there were no postcards to be found. So, I checked at the desk and got a confused look, in fact I had to ask a second time and then she had to check in the back and with a supervisor. The end result, the US post office had no postcards.

I’m a romantic about a lot of things, from air and train travel to dancing on a Friday night. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Luddite. I love my high speed internet and cable television. But, in a lot of ways, I think we all could benefit from a slower world. If I can take my post office’s being dumbfounded by a request for a postcard as a sign of their disappearance as a form of communication, I have to think it’s also a symptom of our ever-accelerating world. Some of it’s understandable, I mean you can tweet, post, text, and email virtually free and your message will arrive instantly while sending a postcard requires buying the postcard and postage and the recipient won’t get the message for days at the best.

What’s the upside of postcards? In a word, the same upside a real letter has over an email. The lack of immediacy leaves time for thought. Though you can read and re-read an email before sending it, the medium encourages quick, type-and-send messages. Nobody writes masterful email messages. There never will be a book of the collected email messages of a famous person. Nobody will ever go to their keepsake file to re-read that old email message they got from their true love. Likewise, you’ll never get a beautiful email from Maui, Tokyo, Paris, or Rome. Opening an attachment doesn’t have the same impact as opening your mailbox on a cold January day to find a little card that carries with it the scent of summer breezes and exotic paradises. Letters and postcards bring romance, no extra postage required.