Postcards The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network by Lydia Pyne

 Postcards

The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network by Lydia Pyne that will be released this next Nov 21 is an immersion in a popular, culturally colored world and in the most undiscreet first social media, as underlined by the author, of our modern times: postcards, ladies and gentlemen. 

No sure you, I am a postcards addicted and collector! Not anymore as in the past because in our country shipping costs are prohibitives, but I do sure am a member of Postcrossing and I have friends, as Maria, from Moscow, that when sends me postcards from the places she visits (she travels a lot, lucky girl) enchants me with her observations of places, cities, restaurants and views. 

Why do we send postcards? We send them mainly because we are affectionated to the sender, and we want to transmit something of special: our joy, sharing observations, some facts of the places where we are in; someone can just write a succint: 

Ciao from Venice! Love... 

No sure you, I do that all the times! being also a postcards's collector  I request the postcard to my friend tourist.

You musn't never think that the final message of a postcard is what written on the back. The cover, its "face" is extremely important, like also stamps, because messages that postcards vehicolate are the most diversified ones and thanks to stamps you also learn the cultural touch of a different country. Being creativity the motion engine of postcards, most of them will be so beauty that  we will add them all in special places of our home, for being showed by everyone, remaining in our memories forever.

A postcard is also important because as it does the Postcrossing for example, you can start to learn every little or big place in the world and it is a powerful method this one: the creation of a lot of connections in the most diversified places in the world.

The first two decades of the XX century people sent something like 200 billion of postcards.

Postcards became famous and largely used just before the First World War.

The physicality of the postcard is immediate, and mostly joyous.

What can you find in a postcard? An universe that must just be discovered!

I can tell you I received maps of several states of the USA; but also monuments, seascapes, landscapes, cartoons and much more.

The most beloved ones remains the ones of the Holidays!

There are countries like Iceland where sending postcards for Christmas means a real big big work for the post offices.

We speak of postcards sometimes leaving apart the work that there is behind every postcard sent. Rapidity of the post offices are indispensibles for a good connection.

The author writes: "Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged."

Postcards are collected as I wrote before, and Lydia tells the example of his grand-father. He collected hundreds and hundreds of postcard since the beginning of the XX century to the 1920, the so-called Golden Age of Postcards.

Reading the postcards of someone, sent to someone else is like to enter in the existence of that two unkown people. You don't know them but you try to understand, where possible, their existences.

Lydia, for studying better the topic, asked to her family members of sending her the postcards received and she will accompany her observations in the book using them.

A billion postcards passed through Germany in 1903. Personally I can tell you that Germany, has kept stamps pretty cheap: Germany is one of the most important members of the Postcrossing where not the strongest partner; another way for keeping a business going on with success.

When the biggest crisis affected postcards? Again the guilty is the internet, with the advent of electronic postcards (that, anyway expires after a while) because people saved a lot of money.

The United States Post Office was in crisis in 1909 but, surprise! had a surplus of a great amount of money thanks to postcards: it is, after all, what it is doing Germany at the moment with the possibility for every person of cultivating a good hobby, remembering people also thanks to this method; vice-versa Italy is doing all the opposite; it is seriously too expensive sending many postcards from our country.

Postcards were also a powerful vehicles for sending to beloved ones other items with them. Some people for example shared also journals, with news, items, postcards and facts; these journals were sent to all the family members that lived in different States of the USA and each of them added news, postcards, pressed flowers, stickers for being seen by the other participants.

The Washington Post in an article by Frederic Haskin wrote in 1910  that "The post card business is very profitable to the Post Office."

An impressive portrait is the one of rural areas, seen as abandoned places without any right and neglected by post offices: situation changed when government understood the importance of giving coverage also at these places and so postcards became, also in these parts of the USA, where streets and roads were less excessibles, something romantic, painting a society suggestive and plenty of good values. 

In 1874 thanks to the Treaty of Bern several countries decided the legislation for sending postcards in other countries.

In the while in six decades Curt Teich & Co. produced a billion of postcards! The production in mass of postcards began!

Curt Otto Teich arrived from Europe and his family was involved in printing. It was simple to start also the production of postcards, because, natural, it was a new business.

There was also who created propaganda in the most different ways using postcards.

George Eastman, Kodak, created picture postcards. Which was the difference? In this case there is more reality, and the picture is taken for vehicoling a precise message.

The movement of suffragists used  picture postcards for spreading the message of their cause.

Picture postcards could be personalized by the sender, because they captured a moment of interest in his existence.

Postcards served also tourism, of course. In 1990 the Klein Postcard Service of Boston decided to publish a series of postcards as a protagonist their beloved and yummy! delicious lobsters. This, for intending that everyone in Boston was at home.

The Grand Tour of the last century was reason for sending postcards, letters apart and during the past century people started to travel abroad more massively than not in other periods.

An important chapter will involve the places disappeared with the time because of political reasons mainly.

The final chapter is about the...life of a postcard when received.

Postcards remains a big instrument of communication for discovering new places, people, customs, traditions of distant and unknown land.

If you love postcards, if you collect them, if you treasure them, if you, simply love to send or receive them, this book is for you!

Highly recommended.

I thank Reaktion for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori