Press release / Postcard article for national press

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tonymckendrick
Posts: 34
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2005 8:55 pm

Press release / Postcard article for national press

Post by tonymckendrick »

The following article has been sent (along with some attractive postcard illustrations) to the Daily/ Sunday Mail group, Guardian / Observer, Sunday Times, Suday Express and Independent. the hope is that we can get some free coverage highlighting the show. If anybody has suggestions for other publications we could try, please post ideas on the message board.

100 Years of Picture Postcards


100 years ago the craze of collecting picture postcards reached its peak. The years 1900-1918 are often referred to as ‘The golden age of picture postcards’ and in 1906, some 850 million of these miniature works of art passed through the mail in this country. The post office delivered up to six times a day and the postcard not only provided a cheap and efficient method of mass communication but satisfied a collecting fervour which swept the land.
First sanctioned in 1894, privately produced picture postcards did not become popular in this country straight away. Already in common use on the continent, their development here was hampered by post office restrictions on size which were only relaxed in 1899. The patriotic fervour surrounding the Boer War found an ideal medium in the picture postcard and images of military leaders and artist drawn designs by Harry Payne and others provided a boost to a growing collecting hobby.
In 1900 Raphael Tuck, the foremost postcard publisher of the time, announced a £1000 prize competition for the largest number of their cards that had passed through the post, further fuelling the hobby. (The winning total was 20,364!).
The subject matter of the designs soon covered every facet of Edwardian life and colourful albums full of cards of exotic subjects and faraway places held pride of place in almost every home, replacing the drab sepia cartes de visites so popular in Victorian times.
Automatic vending machines were installed at railway stations and holiday destinations and everywhere a curious development took place. In a letter to the ‘Picture Postcard Magazine’ of August 1900 a contributor on holiday to the continent wrote:
“You enter a railway station and everybody on the platform has a pencil in one hand and a postcard in the other. In the train it is the same thing. Your fellow travellers never speak. They have little piles of picture postcards on the seat beside them and they write monotonously. Recently I went up the Rigi with a large party. Directly we arrived at the summit everybody made a rush for the hotel and fought for the picture postcards. Five minutes afterwards everybody was writing away for dear life. Nobody troubled about the glorious view. I believe that the entire party had come up, not for the sake of the experience or the scenery, but to write postcards and to post them on the summit.”

By the end of World War One, the boom had passed, but today, these postcards are being avidly collected a second time around. There are some 80 or so fairs every month up and down the country dedicated to the buying and selling of old postcards. On October 11th the flagship event of the hobby, The Picture Postcard Show (http://www.postcard.co.uk) takes place over 4 days at the Lawrence Hall, Royal Horticultural Society in London SW1. Almost 100 dealers from more than 10 countries will be catering for an expected 3000 buyers. Prices for old collectable postcards start at a few pence and for certain rare examples are now breaking the £100 barrier. The internet and a recent surge of interest from the family history lobby are affecting prices, but the vast majority of these century - old pieces of ephemera can still cost less than £5.