Postcrossing Blog

You know how sometimes you see photos in which a postcard is put in front of the place where its picture was taken? Like this:

Sometimes the image on the postcard was taken many years ago, and now the surroundings look different and buildings have changed… but you can still kind of see where that image used to fit, like a magic window looking into the past! Lately, I’ve seen more and more of this type of images popping up on social media, featuring both postcards and stamps, with the respective hashtags #xtremedeltiology and #xtremephilately. I find them brilliant! 😍

Graham Beck (from Youtube channel Exploring Stamps) started using the #xtremephilately hashtag back in 2017, and described it as a way to “take stamps out of their cozy albums and showcase them in the real world for everyone to see via social media”. More recently, he has made a wonderful video about exploring Atlantic City through its postcards:

So how can you join the fun? Just pick a stamp or a postcard, and take a picture of it near a relevant place! If a building or monument is featured, it can be in the place where it stands (or used to stand), but sometimes you can also be more metaphorical about it and make an obscure connection. Then all you have to do is share it on social media, or on the forum topics for this kind of stamps and postcard pictures.

It’s a great way to learn more about our postcards and stamps, and the perfect excuse to get out there and share those special items (and the hobbies associated with them) with the world. We’d love to see the places you explore and what you learn about them!

Ever since I started writing book reviews about books that involved mail in some way, people have made the same recommend­ation again and again. I promised last time, so I can’t get out of it now… yes, I’ve finally read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society!

The title makes it sound a bit quirky, but it’s worth knowing going in that it actually looks at the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Guernsey. Many of the characters describe traumatic experiences, including the experiences of prisoners of war.

It also includes a lot of references to and discussion of a past romance between an islander and a Nazi (who was kind and sympathetic to her, and to others on Guernsey, who remember him fondly). I know that among the romance community there are a lot of people, especially those with personal connections to the Holocaust, for whom these types of romances are very upsetting, due to the fact that they can valorise characters who are implicitly or explicitly condoning Nazism. It isn’t the main romance of the book, but it is important to the story, and I didn’t want to review this without at least warning readers who might find that quite upsetting.

All that said, the book definitely has plenty of charm and quirk! The whole thing is told via letters, almost without exception, aside from one case where a private diary is used. This gives lots of room for characters and relationships to shine, which I’ve always really enjoyed. It can be difficult to make it read naturally; we don’t usually explain basic facts about our lives to our regular correspondents, after all! Letters can be so revealing, but it takes reading between the lines, and the best authors make that work in fictional letters too. I found the letters in this book mostly satisfying, and it’s made a little easier by the fact that many of the characters haven’t known each other before writing.

Because the whole thing rests on letters, the plot is somewhat basic; those characters and relationships have to carry the book. I will say that I would have preferred to see a couple more letters between a particular pair of characters, to develop things a little more and allow us to see them interacting and building a relationship. I was all on board for that relationship, but we see it mostly from outside after a certain point… it’d have been nice to get a better look at their growing friendship.

The thing that surprised me most, in the end, was the setting: I didn’t really know anything about Guernsey and its history, and now I want to!

My new review here will take us a bit further afield than Guernsey: I’ll be reviewing Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters. I have lots of thoughts about it already, so I’m looking forward to writing a proper review for everyone.

If you have ideas and recommendations for a book you’d like to see me review for this blog, get in touch! I have a topic on the forum for sharing these recommendations (you’ll need to be logged in to view it, and may need to browse the forum a little to open up all the areas first), or you can comment here.

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

On the forum topic with writing prompt suggestions, Gwen (aka GJG) asks about everyone’s grocery list, which we think is a fun and quirky topic. So, let’s do that this month!

Around here, we always have a grocery lists running, usually on an app that is shared with the household. This way, we can all add items to it on the go, and anyone can get things from the market if they happen to be out and about.

At the moment, our list includes almond flour, eggs, cabbage, decaf, cheese, envelopes to mail some prizes and Sugru to fix a few cables. Oh, and I must not forget some chocolate! Yesterday’s cheeky trick-or-treaters took the last of it… 😅

It sounds rather eclectic when I look at it written down like this, and I wonder if you’re imagining what I’ll do with those ingredients… Now’s your turn — what is currently on your grocery shopping list? We invite you to share it with us on the comments below, and on the postcards you send out this month!

We assume everyone has heard of Wes Anderson’s movies by now. From The Grand Budapest Hotel to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his delightfully quirky visuals and unique storytelling perspective have made him a beloved filmmaker and a cinema icon. You can always immediately tell when you’re watching one of his movies, sometimes by a single frame! There are places out there in the real world that look a lot like a scene from one of his movies, often a single peculiar house, an ornate façade or just a color scheme that evokes another era…

Enter the Accidentally Wes Anderson project (or AWA for short). They’re a community of adventurers with an appreciation for these fine idiosyncratic sceneries that play out all over the world, collecting them and displaying them on the AWA website and Instagram account. The result is a carefully curated map and galleries featuring hundreds of delightful travel-worthy locations. Anyone can submit a new location to the map, so it’s a good idea to always keep an eye out for any structure, façade or surroundings with a special symmetry that moves the imagination.

Photo by Madeleine Ryan

As fans of trips to unusual places, we love browsing these and bookmark spots for a future vacation or roadtrip. In particular, we like discovering new mail-related places, and the nice people at AWA have put together a snail mail collection that makes us very excited indeed! Check out North Hobart Post Office, Saigon’s Central Post Office, or the Post Office at the end of the world… Don’t those look like they’re all worth a visit?

The AWA community has been going strong for 5 years, and in the meantime, a book featuring the best of these locations has been published, with 500,000 copies sold around the world in 7 languages. Now, a cool postcard book joins the collection as well, featuring 26 of these special places. We’re super excited about it, and have thus partnered with them to offer a few of these to postcrossers! 🎉

There are 20 prizes in total to be won: 3 books, 2 super special copies of the postcard book signed by Wes Anderson himself, and 15 standard postcard books! There are 2 ways to participate in this fantastic giveaway, and you can choose one or both of them:

• You can explore the AWA map, and then leave a comment on this blog post to let us know which place there you’d like to travel to the most;

• If you have a postcard of a place that you think would fit right into one of Wes Anderson’s movies, send it to the AWA with a message and your Postcrossing username (written clearly)! The address is:

  Giveaway’s deadline is past, so the address has been removed.

  For this raffle, postcards entries will count double.

Because this giveaway involves postcard submissions, we’re giving it an extended deadline, so that everyone has time to dig around for nice postcards and mail them. The deadline for their arrival is January 15 February 15, and which point we’ll pick the winners and announce them on a separate blog post. Good luck everyone! We can’t wait to see the locations you share! 😍

Hurray! The German Postcrossing stamp is out and about, and the first postcards sent with it must already be arriving to the nearest mailboxes this week, and making its way around the world to many others out there. It’s been a long while since we attended a stamp launch event, so we wanted to show you a little bit of what happened in this latest one, which took place in Berlin on October 7.

The Museum of Communications Berlin very generously offered to host the day’s events, which were organized in two parts: one formal event, and the more informal meetup of postcrossers.

For the formal part, representatives of the Ministry of Finance, Deutsche Post, the Bundesdruckerei (the company responsible for printing ID cards, money and stamps in Germany), as well as philatelic associations and Postcrossing gathered in a room of the museum. Some nice speeches were made by the different parts, including an introduction to the history of postcards by the Museum Director Mrs Anja Schaluschke, as well as a speech by state secretary Dr Carsten Pillath, who also distributed special stamp albums. Although designer Greta Gröttrup couldn’t attend the event, she prepared this cute video which sheds some light on her creative process:

After some pictures, it was time for the meetup to begin!

The Lichthof (the circular hall of the Museum of Communications) was set up with tables and chairs, and postcrossers started pouring in. Some took a guided tour of the museum, while others sat down to chat and write some postcards together. We had the chance to talk with most participants for a bit, and it was just lovely to meet different people and hear their Postcrossing stories.

There was even time for a group picture, taken by Sabine (aka kroete68)!

You can see more nice pictures of the event at the Museum’s Twitter page or on the respective meetup forum topic.

It was such a fun afternoon, with so many postcards being written and sent! Deutsche Post’s special post office was super busy stamping our cards and even ran out of the new stamps. 😅

A big thanks to the group of postcrossers who put such a nice event together, to those who came and made it brilliant, and to the Museum of Communications Berlin as well, for hosting all of us on this lovely day. Hurray!

We got some special commemorative folded cards featuring the new stamp, its cancellation marks and two detachable postcards created by the stamp designer — and have a few to give away! For a chance to win one, leave a comment below with some ideas for fun meetings and stamp celebrations. The giveaway will run for a week, and Paulo’s random number generator will select ten winners by this time next Sunday. Good luck!