The Last Days of the Postcard?

Nice post, Eva.

Hi Eva:

My father’s stamp collection ruined all my postcards from abroad. Not much fun looking at an image from the rank underbelly of the planet, with a bite taken out of the right hand corner.

It’s better to buy Spiritism-type stuff: old postcards from the 19th century, with fancy calligraphy or smeared fountain pen. Postcards from the edge of time. . . .

I think I read somewhere that the postcard was invented by the Germans, who indeed did also introduce the “Christmas Tree” to the U.S. as a holiday trapping in the 1800s. 

What Americans did before that is uncertain, but perhaps they joined hands in the pine forest, pagan-style, like characters out of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” Of course, Boris Karloff’s campy narration made that film: I remember being fascinated when I saw it for the first time: a bunch of blanking alienesque stocking-heads looking for “box.”

Since we all take egregiously bad photos, sometimes it’s worthwhile buying postcards instead.

I didn’t receive any this Valetines but I got a lot online - comments from my social networking accounts and funny flash greeting cards.

Bad news indeed.  I also have pretty much every postcard I’ve ever received, and my parents still have all of their postcards and letters from the late 1960s, when my mother was backpacking around Europe and my father, back in the States, wrote to her in care of various travel agencies across the continent.  Great documents of their own lives and of travel in that era.  Later this year, I’m hoping to use the postcards to re-trace some of the journeys they discuss. 

There’s also a tradition in my family of having random people contribute to postcards.  My parents and my sister have sent me many postcards, from all over the world, with one sentence each from five or ten people, including guides, waiters, traveling companions, and seemingly every passerby.  It’s always fun to find out later who the contributors were, and it makes for a much better story than the standard “Wish you were here” correspondence.  I try to return the favor when I travel, and have baffled and amused family and friends by sending them postcards filled with greetings from strangers (sometimes even in other languages).  Two years ago, at a travel writing conference in Key West, I had Pico Iyer, Tim Cahill, Michael Shapiro, and other writers sign the same postcard, which I sent back to my parents.  I hope they still have it!

I too have a soft spot for post cards and continue to send them to friends and family when I’m abroad. The best one I’ve received lately is from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Houston.

Doug - That’s fantastic that your parents still have all those postcards and letters! Somewhere, someone in my family has preserved the letters my grandmother wrote home when she toured Europe with a singing group in the late stages of World War Two, to entertain the allied troops. I’d love to get my hands on them and re-trace her steps, too. (Except, obviously, without performing in front of large crowds of armed men.)

Eva,
I ran into “Postcards in Peril” author and fellow Book Passage Travel Writer attendee, Sherry Wickwire, at a SF Publicity Club luncheon today.  We were chatting and I mentioned your name.  When she mentioned the World Hum reference to me I don’t think she had realized you wrote the post.  Small world.

I think i see an alien ship in one of those cards lol

I collect stamps as I travel. I think post cards will be a good collection as well