Postcrossing Blog

Here it is, the day we’ve all been waiting for — it’s time to wrap up the 8th edition of our Cards for Literacy campaign with Deutsche Post, and finally reveal the results from 2020! Sooooo many postcrossers have once more enthusiastically embraced the challenge, and dutifully written as many postcards as they could. Those postcards were really flying out in all directions!

I know you’re all curious to know the final results, so here goes:

Hurraaaaaaaay! 🎉🎉🎉 This is the best result we’ve ever had in the Postcards for Literacy campaign, breaking the previous record by over €1500 — brilliant! We’re so, so proud of all the German members, for joining this good cause and rallying together to make their postcards extra meaningful last December. It’s been really heartwarming to see.

Even if you’re not in Germany, if you’ve received some postcards from there in the past few months, then it’s likely that you too have taken part in this campaign and contributed to this achievement — well done!

We’d like to take a momento to express our gratitude to Deutsche Post as well, for continuing this long-standing collaboration with Postcrossing and renewing their commitment to improve literacy in Germany, year after year. I think we all appreciate the opportunity of being able to do something good with our postcards, especially in such a difficult year as 2020. 😊

So, all that is left to do now is for Paulo to run his script to choose the winners of this year’s prizes. If you’re in Germany and participated in this campaign, keep an eye on your email — you might be the lucky winner of some shiny custom stamps or a new messenger bag.

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!

March’s writing prompt is about bridges… big or small, sturdy or wobbly, they keep us connected over rivers, valleys or other obstacles. Do you have bridges that are special to you, or which you’d like to visit?

Personally, a couple of bridges come to mind. I don’t really have a favourite bridge for architectural reasons, or because they’re particularly beautiful or in beautiful places. For me, as soon as you say “bridge” I think about the bridge over the Taff in Cardiff, which you cross immediately after passing Cardiff Castle and the Animal Wall (pictured! Image is by Keith Edkins) on the left. It’s really close to where my nan lived, so it’s familiar from years and years of visiting my grandparents. Cross that bridge in the other direction, and I’m walking to a second-hand bookshop, Waterstones, the library… It’s home, even though I haven’t lived in Cardiff for a while now.

I can’t really think of any bridges up here in South Yorkshire, but there are quite a few bridges in Cardiff, where my family are from, that I have nostalgic feelings about. Most of them are small bridges in a park, over streams which my grandad would have to (try to) stop me jumping into…

How about you? In your postcards this month, you can write about your favourite bridges, bridges you want to see, famous bridges in your country… and you can let us know here in the comments, too!

Whose brilliant idea was it to make a huge census before the end of the year, knowing very little of survey design and statistics? 🙋‍♀️ In theory, it sounded like a good idea… but then soooo many more of you replied than we expected, that it has definitely been a challenge to parse through all this data and make sense of the replies. Slowly though, we’re making our way through the numbers and getting a better idea of who postcrossers are, and how we can more effectively stir the project in the future.

So let’s start this analysis by the basics and try to paint a picture of who postcrossers are, based on the things that stand out from the census.

We knew this already, but Postcrossing continues to be a lot more popular among women overall, and the age range of the typical postcrosser is quite spread out. Somehow, I expected to see more teenagers reflected in the statistics… but then again, I can’t imagine a teen having the patience to reply to a survey, so that may explain it. 😅 Overall, we’re quite happy about this age distribution, which tells us this is a community that is made out of not just young people, but older generations as well.

About 74% of people surveyed live in what they consider urban areas, which in hindsight is probably something we should have defined better, as the line between a city and something else is often not very clear — another thing to improve on the next census. And finally, most of us feel very comfortable using computers and the internet (which was option 5 in the scale).

Not unexpectedly given their popularity, most postcrossers seem to prefer Instagram over other types of social media, followed closely by Youtube and Facebook, with Twitter a distant fourth. Note for 2021's census: do a better job at including non-English social networks, which we completely missed! Still, quite a few of you mentioned VK (the Russian social network), Whatsapp and Telegram, WeChat and Weibo and even websites like Ravelry, Goodreads and Bookcrossing.

One of the questions asked “Are you a collector?”, and 37% of you mentioned you weren’t collectors at all, but almost half of the respondents said they collected postcards and 20% mentioning being stamp collectors. Keep in mind that this was a multiple choice reply, so there’s likely some overlap of people who are collectors of more than one item.

Beyond postcards and stamps, the answers split into a myriad of replies, all with just a tiny percentage each. Here are the top 10 most popular collections: currency, books, magnets, stickers, bookmarks, pens/pencils, rocks/minerals, dolls, tea and art. What we found most interesting though were the choices that just a few people picked, like thimbles, snow globes, fruit stickers, rubber ducks, funko pops… the list stretches into infinity! That said, 11 of you mentioned collecting “elephants” and we hope these don’t refer to the actual animal, or you’ll quickly run out of space at home… 😅

That’s all for today! We’ll continue extracting statistics from the census and will report on them throughout the year. Stay tuned!

Hi folks! I’m back again with another of my book reviews. Last time I was discussing Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road… and now it’s time for something completely different. As promised, I picked up Sir Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, a book from his Discworld series which stands alone.

Going Postal's main character is Moist van Lipwig, a con artist given the “option” of turning over a new leaf and breathing life back in Ankh-Morpork’s postal service, which means we start the book with his “execution”, and it takes a while to get round to the post office part. Once it does, the results are a little dismaying for those of us hooked on sending postcards: mail hasn’t been delivered for years, and mostly lies around in heaps in the building, threatening avalanches and blocking off rooms. Moist clearly has his work cut out for him.

As with most of Pratchett’s work, Going Postal is full of humour: that kind of humour that hits the nail on the head. Take this quote about librarians:

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as “Is this the laundry?” “How do you spell surreptitious?” and, on a regular basis, “Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.”

Having worked in a community library for a while, I can tell you that you really don’t go long before you get asked questions like that!

I never really got into the Discworld books before I read Going Postal, but it turned out that what everyone kept telling me was true: sometimes, you just have to find the right book to start with. For me, that was this book, with Moist and the golems and the gargantuan task of not only getting the post back up and running, but also fulfilling some prophecies, avoiding assassination, keeping Lord Vetinari happy, and winning some pretty epic bets. The postal service is at the heart of Going Postal, as you’d expect, and Pratchett’s very conscious of how important those connections between people are, even amidst his humour.

I have to admit that some of the scenes got a little too into the slapstick end of humour for me: there’s an initiation for Moist as a proper postman, once he’s persuaded people to come back and start posting letters, and it relies on things like Moist falling over random items (because postmen end up falling over things in the line of duty, like rollerskates left lying around). It’s a bit heavy-handed at times… but there’s a lot of the intelligent humour that comes from playing with words or saying things which are true in a funny way, too. Moist is a scoundrel, but he grows on you—I found myself really wanting to know how Moist would figure things out and get the mail delivered.

Overall, I’m glad I decided to read this! I’m pretty sure I’ll read Making Money (another Discworld book featuring Moist) in the near future.

That said, my next review for this blog will be a review of the English translation of Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund). As ever, I’d love to hear more suggestions for books I should read. I’ve recently picked up Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine and its sequels, so I’ll be reviewing them soon… but after that, I’d particularly like to read some non-fiction about mail/postal services/postcards. I have a few ideas, but it’d be great to hear yours as well—let me know via the comments to this post, send me a message, or drop a note in the forum thread if anything comes to mind!

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!

Here in Britain, in February we’re starting to see hints of spring: there are snowdrops poking up all over the place in my garden, even though there was snow on the ground only a week ago, and I can see the daffodils poking through the earth already. Which makes this topic feel very timely!

One of my favourite flowers is actually the national flower of Wales: the humble daffodil, or narcissus. In the UK, the Wales Country Definitive stamp for International Standard mail actually has a daffodil on it, and it’s the stamp I often use for postcards.

The stamp doesn’t really do them justice: traditional yellow daffodils are such a cheerful colour, and they mostly take care of themselves — even without a green thumb, I’ve managed to grow daffodils in my garden. Which is a good thing, because it doesn’t feel like spring until I’ve seen narcissi in flower… and I actually love daffodils so much that I had a bouquet of them for my wedding. They were out of season, since we had a summer wedding, so my wife-to-be made my whole bouquet out of paper for me!

In February, I’ll make sure to write a little about daffodils when I’m sending my postcards — will you join me and write about the flowers and plants that are special to where you live? We’d love to hear more here in the comments, as well as on your postcards.