Postcrossing Blog

Stories about the Postcrossing community and the postal world

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Have you ever heard of the LGBTQ+ VR museum? It’s a virtual reality exhibition that tours the world, featuring artifacts, artwork and stories of LGBTQ+ people. The stories behind these objects are truly moving, and their presentation in an interactive medium makes them even more special. Here’s a preview:

When the exhibition was hosted in London by Deloitte in November 2022, visitors could leave notes at the end, sharing their thoughts. Each card had a prompt like “Advice to my younger queer self” or “I think it’s important to live authentically, because…” or “I’m an LGBTQ+ ally because…” and lots of people left their thoughts on their way out.

After the event, some of these anonymous reflections were picked up by Deloitte’s designers and turned into a collection of beautiful hand-drawn postcards!

An animated gif that rotates through all the postcard designs in this collection. The cards all have sayings and feature colorful designs and calligraphy

When Deloitte heard about Postcrossing recently, they realized this would be the perfect way to spread these postcards out into the world, and have them reach people out there — and we couldn’t agree more! These joyful postcards deserve to make their way into the hands of the people we love and are proud of! Like they say, “A story shared is a person seen”, and we want people to know that we see them.

A pack of postcards lays on a wooden table. The cover of the pack features a colorful design that reads A story shared is a person seen

So Deloitte partnered with us to give out 100 packs of 5 postcards each, to 100 postcrossers out there! To participate in this giveaway, just leave a comment on this blog post telling us who you would send one of these postcards to. Maybe to someone you love? Or someone you know who could use a bit of encouragement and support? Or maybe you would save it for the next person who mentions being part of the LGBT community on their Postcrossing profile? We want to know how far and wide these postcards will travel!

A collage of all the postcards from Deloitte, featuring colorful designs and calligraphy

This giveaway will run for 2 weeks, and Paulo’s random number generator will select 100 winners when the giveaway closes. We’ll post the winners on this blog post then, and if you’re a winner, you’ll also receive an email from us. Good luck, everyone!

And the winners of this giveaway, as chosen by Paulo’s random number generator are… romiknaa, vloki, Kitaloko, swandog, SimoneB, charzevans, AndyBeau, Windows95, dogfan, Myrake, LucanBoy, 400TX, rutkiuss, vw08, froukjeb, thecottonwoods, Iain0154, asuayan, hairygranola, AlohaJoe, Reisegern, ScubaET, Casehandler, cardexplorer_1, GermanInArabia, Kanjada, ricrui3, sohnderleere, vanessavan, Smiley, imtuz, Julia1506, Portiariana, Luziaceleste, scrabblebum, Aqality2, Butternut_Jen, nichaha, Kwiche, badgirlsclubjpeg, Selena, Anka-89, ryangray, dackelerna, SassyChicken, StarStickersAJ, Lylaaaaa, cwalther, TwasBrillig, gabrand, nekelin, Dodoki, maengelexemplar, GayeDoreen, TigerLilyLeela, pamgran, menschenskind, Alysse, ThePostCat, flyingmomo, PCBlue, mkmk, Queen_of_the_Hounds, Linguamoris, Karina2005, micklpickl, Tarane, cysiphist, Chocola-t, Sammone, ctr, siff, QBert, lbp1961, rachaface, frncs, Aileen93, paloma_zl, Idler, jess_sea, valewritespostcards, Knirin, Ebi, avery27, Hadrill, mteton, CorgiLove, ned44440, kintsugi, milkiwei, OldManSea, MoominMog, AmandaB, EricTheMailman, Gummy, Troy-S, nublu, AbstraktesHerz, SingleTunePoet, hh_h4a, kitchentable, cataloger25, Evalefthanded and mondkind. You should all receive an email soon.

Congratulations, and thank you all for participating! Your answers and touching stories brought tears to our eyes, and we wish we could give a tight hug to every one of you!

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The day has come, when we finally announce the results of the book and postcard set giveaway we’ve been doing with the Accidentally Wes Anderson project for the past few months!

A big red AWA logo, with Est 2017 around it, and the tagline Accidentally Wes Anderson underneath it

Hundreds of postcrossers participated, leaving comments or sending postcards to the AWA headquarters in New York, and we couldn’t be happier that so many of you decided to take part. We learned about soooooo many new places worthy of a detour or a full trip… 😍 Beauty lurks at every corner, it seems, if only one knows how to look for it!

A set of scenic postcards on a rug

So now, without further ado, here are the lucky winners, as chosen by Paulo’s script:

Super congratulations to all the winners! 🎉

AWA postcard from Lisbon

Because they want to see their new postcards travel around the world to as many hands as possible, the nice people at AWA are running a discount for postcrossers, in which you get 30% off when buying a set of postcards. Just use promo code POSTCROSSING at checkout to receive 30% off your postcards order. A special “Snail Mail” collectible sticker is included in all orders! 😍

And last but not least, thank you for all of your participations and enthusiasm! We hope you will all go out and explore this world we live in, with all its quirkinesses and special places, worthy of a movie scene! Make sure to snap some photos and upload them to the AWA map, to pass them along to other intrepid explorers.

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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…

A big red AWA logo, with Est 2017 around it, and the tagline Accidentally Wes Anderson underneath it

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.

A picture of North Hobart's Post Office colorful façade 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;
  • The AWA postcard book on a background of blue tiles
  • 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! 😍

This giveaway is now finished, and the winners have been announced!
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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.

A big green banner welcomes newcomers to the Postcrossing event at the museum. In the background, the great hall can be seen Groups of postcrossers spread around in tables, writing postcards at the Museum for Communications' large hall

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

A few dozen postcrossers wave to the camera in the museum. In front, a banner stating Postcrossing can be seen.

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

Six postcards lay flat on a table, featuring the new stamp and special cancellation mark

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. 😅

Commemorative cards and cancellation marks

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!


And the winners of this giveaway, as chosen by Paulo’s random number generator are… ashcubes, Puceron, triplightly, rubber_ducky, davedrolll, industria, Axolotl_, margreetbtn, geo_ and -Hector-. Congratulations everyone, thank you for taking part and sharing your suggestions!

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It’s not everyday one gets an invitation to learn more about the history of printing presses and how they work… so when the invitation came, the Little Mail Carriers jumped into their envelope and made their way to the north of Germany, where the newly revamped Museumsdruckerei Hoya (Hoya’s Printing Museum) is re-opening today! Here they are, to tell you all about what you can discover inside.

Being Mail Carriers, we hold many paper goods in our hands every day. These are letters and postcards in various sizes and colors with all kinds of stamps on them – lots of printed and written paper. Like thousands of postcrossers in the world, we are fascinated by stationery, paper and other printed matters. So are our hosts Claas (aka Speicher3) and Christine (aka Reisegern), who have shown us today how the printed letters and images have been applied to paper since ages.

They invited us to come with them to Hoya, a small town on the river Weser in Northern Germany.

The Little Mail Carriers look onto the Hoya bridge

Once we arrive in the letterpress printing office Museumsdruckerei Hoya, we are welcomed by Michael Linke, who built up an amazing collection of printing presses and types over thirty years.

Overview of the museum, showing lots of printing presses and wooden drawers Rows of wooden chests of drawers, filled with letterpress letters

Right at the entrance of the museum, we spot a figurine on a wooden construction. Michael, who’s that?

There are two images: on the left, Michael is standing by a desk, laughing. A poster lies on the table. On the right, there's a mini statue of Gutenberg, and the Little Mail Carriers are standing next to it.

“That’s Johannes Gutenberg, Michael explains. “The figurine is placed on a reproduction of the Gutenberg printing press. Gutenberg is known as the inventor of modern printing.” While we drink some coffee and eat butterkuchen, a typical northern German cake, Michael tells us about the history of printing:

"Already several thousand years ago, simple printed (stamped) seals were used in Egypt and Mesopotamia. More progressive printing technologies were developed in China more than a thousand years ago. For printing books, in the beginning whole pages were carved into wooden blocks, later on moveable letters were invented. That made printing much easier, though for printing something in Chinese, a lot of different characters were needed.

“In Europe, books were mainly multiplied in monasteries by copyists — all handwritten. Until at the end of the Middle Ages, in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg triggered a gigantic media revolution. He used moveable letters made from new materials, found a new ink recipe and invented a special printing press. He combined known printing technologies and his inventions to an efficient printing system. This allowed inexpensive, high-quality mass media production for the first time. The Gutenberg printing system spread across Europe and the whole world.”

But what are moveable letters? Michael encourages us to explore the printing workshop, where we find an aisle full of drawers.

A set of three images filled with letter

Opening them, we discover an overwhelming amount of moveable letters in different sizes and fonts. Yay, let’s take some of them and build a word! It’s a bit complicated, as all those letters are mirrored.

The Little Mail Carriers spell out the word Postcrossing in reverse on a tray, using moveable type.

Michael lets us know: “Before the invention of digital printing, all printed texts were composed by typesetters. They put every single character of the texts line by line into composing sticks, which were then transferred to the printing press.” Wow, what an effort! Can you imagine how many types a typesetter has to handle for a daily newspaper?

In another drawer we find images that look like rubber stamps, but they are made of metal instead of rubber, some very old ones even are woodcuts.

The Little Mail Carriers stand in a drawer, surrounded with old wooden stamps, that can be printed

Let’s take some and see what they look like when they are printed! We’ll combine them with the text we composed in the composing stick. For our first printing experiments, we use a very simple printing press. We put our design in there, add printing ink, lay a sheet of paper on top, close the lid and press firmly.

Images of the printing process: adding ink and lifting the paper after printing Several papers with images printed in the letter press machine. One paper reads Postkarte and Postcrossing, and has two postal horns

That’s fun! Look, the images at the bottom of the page seem to be postal stamps. Michael, would that be possible? Michael explains: “Of course. Stamps were also printed with so-called printing clichés (that’s the name of those images).”

Does this mean, we could print our own stamps in this printing workshop? 🤔 “Good idea!”, Michael says, “We can print your personal stamps here. Did you iron your uniforms? I’ll take a photo of you.” With those photos, a metal cliché is being produced.

The Little Mail Carriers stand in front of the steel plate (cliché) that was made with their photos. The plate show the images and text in reverse

We are so excited! The cliché is fixed in a big printing press. Now we have to work very accurately, because if the height of the image is off by even a tenth of a millimeter, it can make a difference that’s visible in the quality of the print.

The Little Mail Carriers put their plate in the machine securely in place

Can we now print? “I think you forgot something”, says Michael. “You need to grab some printing ink.”

A close-up photo of two tubes of ink, with other ink tubs in the background The Little Mail Carriers stand on top of several tubs of dark ink. The ink is black and looks very sticky

Oh gosh, that’s some thick, sticky stuff. Michael smirks and shows us his totally paint-smeared work coat. “Indeed. If you get that onto your uniform, you won’t be able to remove the stains ever again.”

For this printing press, we don’t need to hand-ink the composition. Instead, we put the ink onto the rollers of the printing press and can print our stamps. Oh, they are wonderful, aren’t they? While the ink is drying, we have some snack and listen to Michael, who tells us more about printing history.

The finished print is shown on the letterpress machine, with the Little Mail Carriers standing in front of it

“Gutenberg’s invention initiated meaningful social developments. Through the mass printing of texts, knowledge, information and opinions could suddenly be spread much easier, more widely and without the control of state and church. Just like today with the internet, many more people were able to access knowledge or publish their own texts through the printing press than ever before.”

Enlightening! We never thought about all that.

Our prints are dry now. But something’s missing. Our stamps cannot be taken apart from each other. So more accurate work is needed for perforating our stamps with a vintage perforating machine.

A hand holds a sheet of stamps, which are being perforated in an old machine

Done! Now we can send out postcards with our own decorative stamps in addition to the normal postage.

Nowadays, most printed matters are being produced with offset or laser printing technologies. We enjoyed our visit to the museum printing office with all those fascinating machines, strange sounds and odors.

Michael and the Little Mail Carriers The Little Mail Carriers sit atop a box, itself on top of a drawer with moveable type

Thank you Michael, we love our stamps. What’s next? “Let’s grab some ice cream and enjoy the evening on the banks of the river Weser.” A great suggestion, Michael!

Information: Michael decided to commit his collection to the public, and now the newly founded association Museumsdruckerei Hoya “Zwiebelfisch” is responsible for running the place. Speicher3 and Reisegern are members of the association. The museum’s website (in German) is www.museumsdruckerei-hoya.de, and you can also find it on Facebook: Museumsdruckerei Hoya (no login required!).

Our huge thank you to Claas, Christine and Michael, for this fantastic tour and giveaway! The Museum is opening today again after a long break, and we’re excited to see this beautiful collection be shared with the public, so that people can learn from it and make beautiful things. Hurray!


Reisegern and Speicher3 would like to give away five of the stamp sheets* that were printed with the Little Mail Carriers to the readers of the Postcrossing Blog. If you’d like to win one of these, leave a comment below sharing a memory concerning letterpress machines, suggesting what the next thing we should print should be or what we should write about on our website! The giveaway will run for a week, and Paulo’s random number generator will select five winners by this time next Saturday. Good luck!

A sheet of six cinderella stamps with images of the little mail carriers profiles

(*) Please note that these are Cinderella stamps and cannot be used for postage on your outgoing mail.

And the winners of this giveaway, as chosen by Paulo’s random number generator are… joyoustmjp, paicontea, pbjohnny5, kaitmmo and evbirch! Congratulations everyone, thank you for your enthusiastic participation!