Postcrossing Blog

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!

We have a forum topic for people to contribute writing prompt suggestions for us, and Heather (aka HeatherSuncoast) picked a fun one. If you look at the dictionary Merriam-Webster’s website, you can find out the words that entered the English language in the year you were born.

Perusing the year I was born, there are a lot of worthy candidates. I’m quite taken by the word “bombogenesis” (the rapid intensification of a storm caused by a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure), and as a biologist, I’m fascinated to see that we started talking about "DNA phenotyping“ (the process of predicting various things about an organism, such as how it will look, based on a DNA sample alone). It’s also the first year the word ”cybernaut" was used, which seems pretty old-fashioned now.

But the one that surprised me was the word “extremophile”. An extremophile is an organism that lives under extreme environmental conditions, like in a volcanic hotspring or under the ice caps, where most organisms wouldn’t survive. They’re pretty astounding when you think about the kind of conditions they live under, and they’re also responsible for some really beautiful sights, like the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone (pictured), because they create such vivid colours. I was surprised that we didn’t have a word for this kind of organism until 1989!

What about you? Did you find a word that you love, introduced in the year you were born? Or something that seemed appropriate? We’d love to hear your stories, in the comments here and on your postcards this month!

It’s the best time of the year — the time when Postcrossing postcards count for a good cause! It’s hard to believe that this year celebrates the 10th anniversary of this partnership between Postcrossing and Deutsche Post… Ten years have flown by, and in this time, many people have improved their reading and writing skills in Germany with the help of this community. Hurray!

By now, most of you know how this goes, but let’s recap once more for the new postcrossers:

That’s it! If you’re in Germany, now is the right time to stock on postcards and stamps… especially the new Postcrossing stamp! 😍 Once December starts, every postcard you send during that month (that arrives before the end of February 2023) will count towards this good cause. But that is not all, as your postcards could also help you win one of these cool prizes:

• 1 voucher worth €100, to use in Deutsche Post Online Shop
• 5 vouchers worth €50 each, to use in Deutsche Post Online Shop

The more postcards you send, the more you’ll be helping, and the higher are your chances of winning a voucher to spend on Deutsche Post’s shop. Paulo will run his random number generator in March 2023, and we’ll reveal the total amount of postcards sent (and money raised to Stiftung Lesen) on a new blog post. Last edition, €13,729.90 were raised for this good cause, which was just brilliant!

Many of us are not in Germany though, and I know what you’re thinking… how can WE help? It’s easy — we just need to register the postcards we receive extra promptly! In the next few weeks, a lot postcards from Germany are going to be making their way to our mailboxes and the sooner we register them, the sooner it will be possible for that sender to mail another postcard. :)

Stiftung Lesen is a German non-profit organization, working to increase literacy in the population, especially among children and adolescents. Their activities include reading clubs, media literacy projects and initiatives to promote the learning of German language by refugee families in the country. Many of us go through life taking these basic skills for granted, but for those who struggle with them, a small improvement in this area can be life-changing. The work Stiftung Lesen does is super important, and we’re glad for this chance to support them.

We hope you will all join in on the 10th anniversary edition of the “Cards for Literacy” campaign, and are as excited as we are to help others with our postcards!

P.S. – Postcrossing respects your personal information and will not share it with any company without your explicit permission. The full details of this campaign can be read here (German only).

You know how sometimes you stumble on something so nice that you just need to share it? That happened recently to postcrosser Cynthia (aka GoCindy), who found a delightful postal card in a vintage shop in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago:

Cindy explained that the owners of the shop purchase the entire contents of personal estates. They save all of the postcards, photos and cards and stuff them into a big wall unit in the store, and she loves spending Sunday afternoons searching for postcard gems such as this one. She bought this one in particular for the McKinley stamp, but never read the back until recently… and what a nice surprise was hiding there!

It’s a poem and it reads:

From 'round the world these cards have come,
Thro’ every sort of weather.
But here they find a quiet home,
And spend their days together.
Could we but hear with mortal ear,
The tales they tell each other,
What joys of travel we might have
Without a bit of bother.

Is that just brilliant? How fun to imagine all the postcards we receive having a little party together in their box or album, telling tales of their travels! We really wish we could hear them chat…

Have you found some cool vintage postcards lately? Do share them with us and the Postcrossing community on the forum! 😍

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.