Postcard-Carrying Fan - Esther

There’s something elegant about a postcard, something accessible & inclusive. Requiring no envelope, they’re environmentally friendly, are a consistent size, easy to pack, can be used as bookmarks, relatively cheap & unless the one you send is a novelty item (such as the current trend for wooden postcards), cost no more than a regular stamp to post. It’s a pity they’ve become synonymous with cheap souvenir tourist tat & the smell of burger vans. There are perhaps fewer postcards being sent this summer than at any time since their invention.

MM (Shoot That Tiger!)

The earliest known postcard, assumed to be a practical joke was made in 1840, its image a drawing of postal workers, sent to writer & apparent wag Theodore Hook by… Theodore Hook. One had to make one’s own entertainment in those days. Of course amusement is another matter – as with photography, soon after it was realised such a thing can be made & distributed, nude humans began to be used as the subject matter for images. See also advertising (use of postcards as well as nudity).

Weary (James McNeill Whistler)

As I have said in a previous post, my relationship with the postcard blossomed at school & as a college student. When I developed a real interest in art, it was simple enough to collect art memories gathered from revolving stands almost everywhere you went. You didn’t need a lot of money to bag a memento & you didn’t have to buy an entire book if you only liked one of the artist’s works.  School encouraged me a little to develop distinct tastes & discern visual characteristics in artworks by assembling images & before I knew it or even thought about it, I had a collection. Collecting postcards is an almost lifelong habit I have failed to break.

Twee Konijntjes (Julie de Graag)

Although it was my original purpose, there were reasons to buy & be sent postcards other than art, genuinely keeping in touch for instance, especially as a student. Flipping through what I have kept, I find they are a reminder of the past in odd but touching ways. Oily blu-tack marks remain in the corners of several old favourites. This dates them because after the bedrooms at home were repapered, blu-tack wasn’t allowed…

De Blei van de Zwarte Hanen (Enzo Cucchi)

It’s nice to see words from the friendships kept & a little sad to see the ones lost; it’s curious to see what interested us then, what we considered important & funny, or trivial enough to safely share with anyone that might possibly read them. My friends’ & family’s handwriting has scarcely changed & it’s pleasing to discover that too. A teenage (& beyond) obsession with Marilyn Monroe has left me with a pile that fills about half a shoebox, though I used to have nearer a shoebox-ful. Although I don’t deliberately collect these now (although I might if the situation called for it), my hand still hovers over the racks where I spy new reproductions of old posters for her films or previously un-postcard-ed photographs.

Part of the MM bundle

One of the postcards I’ve owned the longest is a closeup photograph of a bookbinding by Faith Shannon of George Maw’s The Genus Crocus (1886) from 1973, housed in Liverpool’s Hornby Library. It still has the power to intrigue, despite the many times I’ve looked at it over the years. I’m not sure whether this was the taste my school was really expecting me to foster, a taste for the surreal, the dark, the accepting of nature as a beautiful & potentially terrible thing, almost folk horror. But left to my own devices, this is seemingly what I was after.

In Hornby Library, Liverpool 

Art postcards allowed you to dip into artistic adventures. You didn’t have to commit to liking an entire oeuvre. You could like a particular image & leave it at that, it was fine. Such was the case with Anselm Kiefer’s Interieur, whereas Georg Grosz gained a highly enthusiastic fan thanks to a postcard of De Volksmenner.

Kiefer

Grosz

You could make political statements with a postcard. The recipient would be in no doubt as to where your allegiances lay & what your opinions were. The best of these would make you think. I recall my excitement at buying a small bundle of such cards at the Well Fed Café on my first trip to Dublin. The Well Fed Café in Temple Bar was split into two sections. First you could become a political radical in their bookshop section & then get mounds of extremely cheap vegetarian food in the restaurant part (which was still a fairly radical concept in the early ’90s). Like all good bookshops, they also sold reams of postcards.  

Mick O’Kelly’s Property had a lasting effect on me.

Apparently I was meant for these times, always one for a universal soundbite, something snappy you could wholeheartedly get behind rather than wade through an entire book, where one wrong idea or careless phrase could let you down, would have you doubting the author meant it for the right reasons or downright hating them & their stupid cause.

 Christine Roche

Kirsten Monton

Arja Kajermo

You could also be literary - & rude - in other languages with a postcard.

Samuel Beckett (photo: Jerry Bauer)

Before the internet & alongside music papers, bands would advertise their tours or new records by sending you postcards.

Free postcards for charities & companies were ubiquitous & occasionally still exist…

Femke Bourgonje

I now have a boxful of postcards of all sorts & a lot scattered about in other boxes. I have three I keep above my computer, clipped to the magazine racks above me: one is an advert for The Damned’s first album, one is of a bronze statue of Shiva & one is of a Harry Clarke self-portrait in glass. They’re partly there for the sake of sanity & inspiration (both necessary at the keyboard) & partly as a reminder of different sides of my engagement with the world.

Shiva, Damned, Clarke

I want to end with a couple of the jokey postcards I purchased in New York City in 2000. This was my first solo trip abroad but everything was too expensive to go completely mad with consumerism so of course I bought postcards. I also bought one small studded handbag (from a stall outside Bloomingdale’s) which has been much used & loved but is now starting to come apart at the base of the handle. I may have to get it repaired for much more than the bag cost to buy, but I like to think my old friends the postcards enabled me to bring back something more long-lasting.

 Stella Mars

Photo: Bill Bernardo