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!

Gifts are on my mind lately, as I finally, gleefully begin to acquire the presents I’ll spoil my family with on Christmas Day. (No, Mum, I won’t be revealing it here, sorry!) So I was glad to notice one of the suggested prompts on the forum, from Eva (aka lauranalanthalasa)…

As usual, I’ll go first! My dad is famous, or infamous, for his gift for picking the right gift. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they just perfectly suit you, sometimes they’ve very silly… but he rarely misses the mark! So one Christmas a few years ago, I went downstairs to find a very mysterious wrapped shape. It was about 5 feet tall (1.5 metres), so only a little shorter than I was… and the shape just made no sense at all. I can’t remember if the other members of my family knew about it, or whether we were all equally befuddled, but my dad was definitely enjoying himself way too much.

Given the photo I’ve added, you all know where this is going. When I was eventually allowed to unwrap it, a beautiful carved wooden giraffe emerged! I’d admired it in a shop window about six months before, and I’d always been a big fan of giraffes… so my dad went back for him, kept him hidden somewhere, and produced him on Christmas Day when I’d forgotten all about him. He’s called Parker (after Detective-Inspector Charles Parker, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ books—I don’t remember why!) and he looms in the background of my Zoom calls to this day.

The next year, of course, there was another large and strangely shaped present, which he’d labelled prominently with the words “not a giraffe”.

What about you? What’s the best present you’ve ever received? Is it something you still have now, an experience you had, something you remember from childhood…? We’d love to hear about it in the comments here and on your postcards this month!

A while ago, I promised a review of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine books. They’re one of the first suggestions people had for me when I said I wanted to start writing reviews of books that feature mail in some way, and they are completely gorgeous. Did you have pop-up books as a kid? Or any kind of books with pockets and things to discover? If you loved those, these are the adult version: some of the pages show postcards, carefully illustrated with stamps and all, while others have decorated envelopes stuck onto the page, with actual letters inside which you can carefully pull out, unfold, and read. The whole experience feels a little like a treasure hunt.

The original three books are not exactly weighty: I think I read all three in under an hour in total—but what an absorbed, fascinated hour! The story is mysterious, opening with a postcard from Sabine to Griffin:

Griffin Moss

It’s good to get in touch with you at last. Could I have one of your fish postcards? I think you were right – the wine glass has more impact than the cup.

Sabine Strohem

This seems a prosaic enough way to start: it looks like a simple enough postcard to an artist, after all. But Griffin writes back (on a postcard with the fish/wine glass image) in consternation. Does he know her? How does she know about the version with the cup? He never showed it to anyone…

It turns out that the two of them share a magical bond, and Sabine has been observing Griffin’s work from afar for quite some time. Their postcards and letters are a beautiful example of how correspondence—even without the correspondents knowing what the other even looks like—can create friendship and intimacy. Griffin and Sabine fall in love via their postcards and letters, and eventually make a plan to meet.

The story is both a love story and a fantastical mystery, and it’s both wonderful and frustrating because it’s told entirely through the medium of the postcards and letters they exchange. You have to fill in the gaps with your own imagination (think about how eagerly they each wait for their postcards!) and do a fair bit of puzzling yourself to imagine what they think as they’re writing the cards and letters. The mysteries never really get resolved (at least not in the original trilogy, though there are more books now), so if you need all the answers, then it might not be for you.

Personally, I didn’t need things to be wrapped up neatly, and I like being left with questions. The books are beautiful, and the reading experience is pretty unique, and even if we’ve never personally been mystically connected to someone we’re writing a letter to, I think we all know a little about the connections that putting pen to paper can forge!

I’m a little behind myself on writing up these reviews—reading the books is always the most fun part!—but I can promise that reviews of Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book (non-fiction about the importance of addresses) and Rita Mae Brown’s Wish You Were Here (a mystery led by a postmistress and her pets) should be coming soon. After that, I think it’s finally time for me to take the leap and read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which was another of the books that people immediately began recommending as soon as I asked for suggestions about epistolary novels and books involving mail. After that, who knows? If you’re on the forum, you can always make suggestions to me in the topic I set up.

Remember a few years ago, when we shared the mystery of the Ford Tanus déjà vu? There’s a Vox video about something similar being shared around this week, and it’s just super neat. Have a look!

How cool is that?! Once you see the cloud shaped like a sea creature, it’s hard to “un-see” it! If you’re curious and want to spot a few cloud patterns of your own, you can explore James postcards on his Flickr page — there’s lots of peculiar collections to see.

Only by putting these postcards together side by side can one begin to see the patterns emerge, like noticing the same clouds or the same car parked in a corner of a card. I wonder how many more patterns could postcrossers detect, if they laid all their postcards out like that… Give it a try and let us know if you spot something interesting! 😊

Has it really been a week? It feels like we’re still in a strange daze, dreaming of postcards, stamps and cancellation marks…

Anyway, it was a blast! It felt like the second World Postcard Day was bigger than the first edition, which is awesome — there were a lot more events, but also more postcards being sent in Postcrossing and more buzz on social media all throughout the day as well. The excitement was palpable, and it seemed like everywhere we looked, a celebration was taking place!

Take Jersey Post, for instance, who set up a display at their main post office where people could write words of wisdom in postcards, to share with others. Sage advice has been pouring in from post office visitors, and it’s really heart-warming to see! A few other postal services joined in the day, issuing a number of special cancellation marks and even some postcards, and there were quite a few events taking place in museums too, like the popular “From Me to You” workshop at the London’s Postal Museum’s café, and events for children in Slovenia and Finland.

Where possible and safe, meetups took place to celebrate the day, in places like Mumbai, Lisbon, Taipei or Bonn! If you were in a meeting, please upload some photos to its forum topic – so few people do these days, but we’d love to see your happy faces and your piles of postcards too.

In London, at Stampex (the biggest stamp collector’s fair in Europe), postcrossers got the chance to listen to a couple of interesting talks about postcards, peruse the stands, and enjoy sending postcards from the show. A total of 3000 World Postcard Day postcards were distributed to visitors this year, so everyone could send a postcard to celebrate the day!

This year, we were happy to see more libraries join in as well, with pop-up postcard writing stations inviting visitors to mail a postcard! A few of these were set up by postcrossers, who donated unwritten postcards to their local libraries and let them know about the World Postcard Day. That was really sweet, and it’s something we’d like to try to replicate in more places next year — wouldn’t it be cool if all libraries had a little postcard basket, encouraging visitors to grab one and mail it on the day? Libraries (and librarians) are the best!

Still, some things didn’t quite go as planned… 😅 Postcrossing’s infrastructure wasn’t made for these peaks of activity, so it struggled a bit to come up with addresses to give out on that day. You might have noticed the site was a little slow or unresponsive at times. Paulo kept an eye on the servers, made some tweaks here and there and slowly things improved towards the second half of the day. We hope to be better prepared for this avalanche next year.

That said, a lot of you have already started seeing the badges on your profiles as your October 1st postcards make their way to their destinations, and I’m sure you’re curious to know how many postcards were sent on that day, right? During October 1st in the UTC timezone, 70,381 postcards were sent through Postcrossing, and that number increases to 75,659 if you count with postcards requested on October 1st in other timezones as well. Hurray! This is about four times more than any other day of the year, so we are super impressed with everyone’s energy and readiness to write a few extra postcards! I bet you looked a bit like us in the gif below…

We’d like to think that these are just a small percentage of postcards sent on World Postcard Day though — hopefully a lot of postcards also went out to friends, family members and other people who we treasure and appreciate.

We hope you all had a wonderful World Postcard Day, surrounded by postcards and the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you’re making other people happy! Thank you for enthusiastically embracing this idea as a community and for making this idea come true, pushing it forward and making the world a better place, one postcard at a time. 💛

PS – Today is World Post Day! UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said: "On World Post Day, we recognize the invaluable contributions of postal workers to our societies and economies. The vast postal network – involving millions of workers moving billions of pieces of mail through hundreds of thousands of post offices – is woven into our societies, connecting communities the world over. ” It is decidedly so, and we are thankful for all of their hard work that brings us closer together through the mail.

After months and months of waiting, it’s finally World Postcard Daaaay!! 🥳

Do you feel the excitement in the air too? If you sit still and listen very very closely, you might be able to hear the busy scribblings of thousands of pens gliding across these little pieces of paper… And have you tried licking a stamp today? They somehow taste better than in any other day of the year… it’s like magic!

World Postcard Day is the day we celebrate the joy that postcards bring, by flooding mailboxes all over the world with happy mail. We cannot but smile imagining the puzzled look of postal workers everywhere, when they notice the avalanche of postcards, making its way through their sorting machines!

For those who are just joining the celebrations for the first time this year, we invite you to learn a bit more about the history of postcards. Did you know this is the day in which they celebrate their 152^nd anniversary? Yup! Postcards have been around since 1869, when Dr. Emanuel Herrmann suggested that a practical and cheaper alternative to letters should be implemented for shorter, more efficient communications. His recommendations impressed the Austro-Hungarian Post, who put them to practice on October 1st 1869, resulting in the Correspondenz-Karte… and the rest is history!

Postal operators, museums, philatelic associations, charities, libraries and postcard enthusiasts in different countries have all put together a number of events to celebrate the day, so do make sure to check them out too.

Oh, I forgot to mention this on the last post! The best meal for the World Postcard Day (as suggested by Bonnie Jeanne’s aka postmuse last year) is ravioli, because they look like little postage stamps! So, we challenge you to make or grab some on your way home — it’ll be our shared World Postcard Day tradition, part of the day’s lore.

Wherever you are, however you wish to celebrate, we hope you have a brilliant World Postcard Day… and we’ll see you on your mailbox! 😊