Postcrossing Blog

Some months ago, we received a message from Janna (aka revode) who told us about her visit to a wonderful postcard exhibition at the Porter County Museum in Indiana! Sadly, we couldn’t go there ourselves… but the cheeky Little Mail Carriers were happy to jump in and volunteer for a guided tour. 😍 Here is the report from their latest adventure!

Hello everyone! We have arrived at the Porter County Museum in Valparaiso, Indiana! We heard that the PoCo Muse has an exhibit with hundreds of postcards on display until January 7, 2024 so we decided to come check it out!

The Porter County Museum was founded in 1916 and has over 20,000 objects in their collection related to the history and culture of Porter County, Indiana. With so many objects in the collection they rotate through what is on display frequently in order to tell as many stories as possible. When we visited, the Robert Cain Gallery was featuring art from the museum’s collection, the Eunice Slagle Gallery had the exhibit “Connections: Take a Closer Look”, and the Montague/Urshel Gallery featured (the exhibit that we traveled here for) “Ever Yours: Postcards from the Golden Age”.

Before searching out the postcards, we explored the Robert Cain Gallery, admiring the work of many Porter County artists who worked to capture scenes from the area. The art in the Cain Gallery rotates out every three months, so that there are always new things to see.

Walking through the museum to get to the postcards, we had to journey through the “Connections” exhibit where seemingly different objects from the museum’s collection are paired together with a variety of connections between them. This concept allows for a wide range of objects to be on display. Did you know that there has been a Popcorn Festival in Valparaiso every September since 1979?

One of the first objects we came across in “Connections” was just our size! It is a scale model of the Maxwell/Remster Dairy Barn which was made by John Remster Sr. for his son John Remster Jr. in the 1950s. The barn can be opened up and played with and has been played with by every generation of the Remster family since its creation! Unfortunately, the barn it is modeled after no longer exists, though the milk house that was connected still stands.

These two pieces are connected by being not the final product. The linocut block (right) shows the artist, Hazel Hannell’s home that was in Furnessville, IN. No prints made from this block are known to exist, though you never know what might be in someone’s attic. The “Brenda Starr Reporter” comic strip was written and illustrated by Dale Messick who lived in Ogden Dunes, IN and inserted many local and personal references into her strip. The comic is in the final stage when it comes to the artist but not for the reader who ultimately would have seen this in the newspaper.

I swear that dog is watching us… 🤨

Check out this postmark stamp! It is from a town that no longer exists! The Tassinong Post office was founded the year after Porter County was founded in 1836, making it one of the earliest European settlements in the region. By 1884, almost all of the Porter County post offices were receiving their mail by rail, Tassinong was one of two still serviced by horseback. At the turn of the 20th century, when the Kankakee Marsh was being drained, the people of Tassinong refused to allow a proposed rail line to come to their town. The railroad, instead, bypassed the village and promoted a new town called Kouts. In 1903 the Tassinong post office was discontinued with all of the people relocating to somewhere serviced by rail.

Can you imagine checking someone out on this cash register? This is a nickel plate brass National Cash Register manufactured in 1914 sold to Wark’s Hardware in Valparaiso. The register worked perfectly at Wark’s until the early 1990s when someone broke into the store and broke the machine. Mr. Wark was not one to throw things away just because they didn’t work, so he disconnected one of the cash drawers from the machine and then it became a very large cash drawer until the store closed in the early 2000s.

Turns out she WAS watching us! This is Daisy the taxidermied dog and her eyes follow you! She is 90 years young and belonged to Helen Slanger of Portage, IN. She has been in the museum’s collection since the 1970s and has become an unofficial icon of the museum.

After journeying through ‘Connections’, we finally made it to “Ever Yours: Postcards from the Golden Age” — the exhibition we had been looking for! I don’t think that that postcard will fit in a regular mail slot…

Did you know that the first postcard was created in 1869!?

The PoCo Muse has over 2000 postcards in their collection. How did they narrow it down to the couple hundred on display? The wall of postcards that are behind us here were all received by one man, John Griffin, from Valparaiso, IN!

Did you know that approximately 1 billion penny postcards were sent every year between 1907 and 1915?

All of these flip books have both sides of a historic postcard with transcriptions! This one is a real photo postcard showing Lila and Thaddeus Whitlock posing with their dog Maxie. Lila sent this to her daughter Olive who was studying Nursing in Iowa in 1912. It is nice to see that people have felt conflicted about their selfies from the beginning; “I was so engaged in trying to keep Maxie still, I forgot to look pleasant.”

The exhibit makes the comparison of postcards to social media of today. The message is public since there is no envelope, the amount of text is limited to the space available on the card, and it is accompanied by an image which might be compared to today’s use of memes. Just like social media today there was pushback to the use of postcards with detractors saying that postcards symbolize “the triumph of the commonplace.”

This binder of postcards shows an individual’s collection of historic postcards that they loaned for the exhibit. In the early 20th century it was common to invite guests over and flip through your postcard collection. Similar to showing friends vacation photos.

After reading all of those postcards it was nice to color some for ourselves. Plus once we are done coloring the booklet, it can be turned into a postcard — just tape it shut and add a stamp on the back! On the wall above, the many postcards sent to the museum are on display, which helps to show that postcards are still thriving today! Hurray! 🎉

Thank you to the wonderful team at the Porter County Museum, and especially Visitor Experience Manager Quinn, for opening their arms to the Little Mail Carriers and showing them around. If you’re in the area, the exhibition will be there until January 7th, so don’t miss it!

The little ones are back on their envelope and on their way to their next adventure… who knows where they’ll pop up!

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!

This month’s theme is mythological creatures, and anyone who’s been following along with my writing prompt posts can probably have a good guess at where my first thoughts went, being Welsh: dragons! What mythological creatures leap to mind for you?

I said dragons were the first creatures to leap to mind (there’s a dragon on the Welsh flag, after all), and they’re deep at the root of some of my favourite myths and legends. (For example, the origin story of Merlin, in Arthurian legends, involves two dragons fighting under the foundations of a castle and causing it to fall down repeatedly.) That said, we’re nearing the Christmas season, and I have another sort of creature in mind: the Mari Lwyd.

Strictly speaking, the Mari Lwyd isn’t really a mythological creature. Traditionally, a Mari Lwyd is a horse’s skull mounted onto a stick and carried round by a person hidden beneath a cloth. It’d be carried around the village or town by a group, who would knock on doors and demand entry, with the Mari causing havoc by snapping its jaws and making a mischief of itself. It was basically an excuse for a party, with lots of food and drink and horsing around. My first meeting with a Mari Lwyd wasn’t like that, though: I read about it in a fantasy novel, Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, where it’s a living creature of sorts, and chases two of the protagonists. It’s a genuinely tense and creepy scene, and part of a book I really love, so perhaps it’s no surprise the Mari Lwyd is deep in my imagination!

Of late, I’ve noticed a lot of people in the wider world talking about Mari Lwyd traditions online, sometimes adding their own flourishes (which is fine, as far as I’m concerned—I’m sure the Mari has caused mischief in many ways over the years). Every year, someone sends me some variant of the image I’ve included with this post: “If you’re cold, they’re cold. Let the Mari Lwyd in.” (I’ve received my first one this year, in November! Like mince pies going on sale, the Mari Lwyd seems to begin earlier every year…) The actual history of the tradition is mixed and confusing, but you can read more about it on Wikipedia if you’re interested in the ins and outs.

So this month, let’s hear about your mythological creatures! Are they creepy or friendly? How seriously are they taken? Are there any interesting traditions about them? You can answer in the comments on this post, or write about them in the postcards you send this month. Or both!

It’s that joyous time again — the season when Postcrossing postcards become beacons of hope and support! This year, we’re thrilled to mark the 11th anniversary of our cherished collaboration with Deutsche Post. A whole decade plus one has zipped by, during which many people in Germany have honed their literacy skills with the help of our united efforts. Hurray!

For our seasoned postcrossers, this will be a familiar recap, but let’s bring our new members up to speed:

That’s the essence of it! If you’re in Germany, now is the perfect moment to stack up on postcards and stamps to be ready for the month ahead. Once December arrives, every card you send within the month (and is received by the end of February 2024, which next year has one extra day!) will contribute to this noble cause. But wait, there’s more – your postcards could also be your ticket to winning these nice 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 contribute, boosting your chances to snag a voucher for Deutsche Post’s goodies. In March 2024, Paulo will set his random number generator in motion, and we’ll announce the total number of postcards sent and funds raised for Stiftung Lesen in a blog post. Last year, we raised an astounding €12,359.60!

What if you’re not in Germany? You’re still a vital part of this campaign! Simply register the postcards landing in your mailbox promptly. As waves of postcards from Germany journey across the globe, your quick registration helps the sender mail another card sooner.

Stiftung Lesen, a German non-profit, is dedicated to improving literacy, focusing on children, adolescents, and assisting refugee families in learning German. These fundamental skills are often taken for granted, but they can be transformative for those who struggle with them. We’re proud to support their invaluable work.

We invite you to join the 11th “Cards for Literacy” campaign, sharing our enthusiasm to make a difference 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).

I promised I’d review E.C.R. Lorac’s Post After Post-Mortem next, a book by one of my favourite British writers from the “Golden Age” of crime fiction (think Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, etc). This particular book was published in 1936 (and republished recently by the British Library in 2022, so it’s fairly easy to get hold of!), and features Lorac’s series detective, Chief Inspector Macdonald. The title refers to the fact that the whole mystery turns on a letter sent by a woman who rather suddenly died, revealing that her death was highly unlikely to be a suicide (which is what it is originally assumed to be).

Before digging in further, I ought to mention first that I found this one a little bit heavy-going due to the subject matter. Because the death is initially thought to be a suicide, the victim’s family suffer quite a bit as a result—and then again when they learn that she was actually murdered, and through being unable to quite trust one another. Unlike some writers of that period, Lorac had quite a gift for writing about places and people that you instinctively care for, so the distress of the characters and the strained feeling in their home all ring quite true for the reader as well. This definitely didn’t feel “cosy” to me in the way that people sometimes call Golden Age crime cosy. It’s not gory or anything, nor gratuitous in any way, but I couldn’t take it lightly.

Anyway, to turn back to the story itself, it fits our theme of books about the mail because the crime is only discovered because the victim happened to send a cheerful letter to her brother right before she supposedly killed herself. I won’t “spoil” the details too much, but it feels like the author thought about the way the postal service works to work out the mystery. In sending a letter or a postcard, you never quite know when it will arrive, and how things will look when it lands on the recipient’s doormat. It’s a little bit creepy to think about receiving a letter from someone after they’ve died, to be honest; it’s a clever story device, but it also provides that human touch for the characters, in showing her brother’s strained reaction.

So I think it’s possible some people might find this one a bit too upsetting, especially as the discovery that it was a murder is at least a third of the way into the book, if not more. I think it was worth it, but in the end, it was a book I appreciated a lot but didn’t love: it is well-written, with characters I cared about and an outcome that mattered to me as the reader, but perhaps less escapist than a lot of the Golden Age crime fiction. If you’d like to give E.C.R. Lorac’s work a try but feel you’d rather skip this one, Death of an Author (also recently reissued by the British Library) had me riveted! The postal service features somewhat less prominently in that book, though. (Boo!)

I’m not sure now what the next book to review should be; if you have any suggestions, then let me know via the forum (you may need to spend some time looking around the forum before that section unlocks). Until next time, happy reading!

To many, the name “Mulready” might not ring a bell… but more avid postcard-connoisseurs will know that these were the grandfathers of postcards! Introduced in May 6, 1840, Mulready stationery were pre-paid postal envelopes designed by artist William Mulready as an alternative to the Penny Black stamp. Despite the intricate design symbolizing the British postal system’s reach, they were mercilessly mocked at the time and overshadowed by the popularity of adhesive postage stamps.

Sometime ago, Graham Beck from popular Youtube channel Exploring Stamps produced this great video about Mulready stationery, in which he interviewed Robin Cassell at Stampex. Robin is an expert and dealer of this type of items, and tells its fascinating and troubled story. If you like philately and postcard history, don’t miss it!

Are there other videos or resources out there about postcards that we should check out? Let us know in the comments — we’re always eager to learn more!