Postcards from the Edge

They are the Rodney Dangerfields of the collectible world. Whether compelling or plain, they rarely get respect. They prompt smiles and laughs but usually little else. They carry short, fleeting messages.

Even so, I love them. Postcards are more than art, history, and geography rolled into one. They are candid snapshots of life and society, pictures often sprinkled with poignancy and humor.

Though I have collected postcards since college, I have only collected them seriously since January, when I paused my novel writing and resumed several hobbies. As with other collectibles I wrote about in March, I began looking at them with a sharper eye.

I started with a core collection of postcards from the 1980s to the 2020s. Most were souvenirs sent by relatives and friends from places like California, Florida, Colorado, and even England and New Zealand. They were pleasant messages from people who were having better vacations than I was.

I kept them in part because I did not know what to do with them. Like a lot of people, I assumed they might someday have sentimental value, if nothing else.

My collection grew exponentially when my wife, Cheryl, gave me cards that been sent to her grandfather as a boy in Iowa between 1900 and 1920, a period considered the golden age of postcards. Though a few were plain, most were not. They bore beautiful illustrations and touching messages from a different time.

From that point on, I jumped into the hobby with a passion. I began collecting postcards not only from people I knew but also total strangers who lived and died long before I was born. I gathered them as artifacts from decades I studied, heard about, and even wrote about.

As a collector, I like postcards over coins, stamps, and baseball cards because they bring so much to the table. Many bear artwork as compelling as those in any museum. Portraying a variety of themes, fashions, and social circumstances, they evoke distant eras, forgotten voices, and the quiet poetry of everyday life. They remind us of the beauty of oil paintings, watercolors, and even sketches.

Other postcards remind us of our history. In big ways and small, they anchor our collective memory in a single moment. They pique interest in places and events in ways that other media cannot. Among my recent acquisitions alone are postcards from Coney Island, Ellis Island, and seven world's fairs, including Chicago (1893), St. Louis (1904), Portland (1905), Seattle (1909 and 1962), New York (1939), and Spokane (1974).

I wrote about the Chicago (The Fair), Portland (The Fountain) and New York (Mercer Street) fairs in my novels, so getting my hands on souvenirs from these notable expositions was a treat. I hope to add more exhibits in that postcard sub-collection in the years to come.

Of course, the historical value of a postcard is not limited to the image on front or the subject matter. There is also the postal handiwork on the back side to consider. Serious collectors seek not only postcards that are old and rare but also ones that have distinctive stamps and postmarks — the collectible’s DNA.

By examining both, collectors can usually pinpoint a mailing date even when the full postmark is not legible or listed. While researching the age of a postcard portraying a Gibson Girl "fishing" for men, I learned that it was mailed from Hales, New York, in December 1908, just weeks before its post office shut down.

Collectors also care about the physical properties of postcards, such as their composition, print quality, and texture. They seek everything from the lithographs imported from Germany in the early 1900s to embossed cards to the linen products of the 1930s to 1950s. They pursue paper artifacts that are as compelling as the images they bear.

Then there are the messages on the postcards. Usually handwritten, sometimes typed, the short narratives provide a sometimes personal glimpse into the lives of ordinary people. On occasion, they also foreshadow things to come, including monumental events that shaped world history.

The best example in my collection is a typewritten message from a woman named Maude to relatives in Illinois. On the postcard of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, Maude wrote, "Things are humming over here with war preparations." The card was postmarked on July 2, 1941 — five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II.

As with my other collections, I expect to expand my postcard compilation — as my limited budget allows. Unlike serious investors who spend thousands of dollars on rare historical treasures, I won't spend more than a few bucks even on a postcard I really like.

I'm okay with that. For me, the upside of collecting postcards is owning another kind of history — the ordinary, everyday kind that is recorded every time someone puts a message in the mail.