Why Do People Collect Postcards

Postcards are photos of places and people in a time and place in history. They depict towns, shops, landscapes, trees that once were and are no longer. They are a pictorial history of the passage of time and can often reveal the evolution of a place over decades, documenting the progress from a small town into a metropolis. There are also hand drawn cartoons, advertising, comical, animals and birds. Whatever you can think have has been depicted on a postcard, much like stamps. Like stamps, postcards also hold a treasure of philatelic history for the collector.

Postcards travelled far and wide across the world in times when this was not an easy feat. They were also a quick way to drop a note to a business, or from a business. They were used by travellers of the world to send messages home and by philatelists to send stamps from all over the world to each other.

There are as many areas of interest in postcards as there are in stamps. Some collectors focus on the photographer, a location, an animal and more. The serious philatelist will try to collect as many postcards from one area to build a complete history of it and write about its evolution. Others simply like to remember their childhood town, where they got married, their first job or where their parents are from.

Stamps On Postcards

I have heard from people who have collected and sold postcards for many years and handled tens of thousands of them, that they have never found a ‘valuable’ stamp on a postcard. By this they mean a highly prized and rare stamp that you could get a few thousand dollars for. To me, this does not mean that the stamp has no worth. Each stamp that is cancelled and posted tells a story. There are also several holy grails to be found on covers (letters that have been posted) which if you know what you’re looking for, you could indeed make thousands of dollars from.

I trade postcards for both the place and the postal history so I try to appeal to both audiences. I highlight the stamp and cancellation and also where the postcard was from, what the picture is of, and the date etc.

Stationary postcards are also highly collected. Stationary postcards were pre-stamped with the denominational stamp of the time, embedded into the card, not stuck on. These came in various forms with flat to embellished representations of kings and queens over time. They are again valuable to cancellations and errors that occured in the printing process.

Who Sent Them to Who

This is another key area of postcard collecting. Many ‘famous’ people from history sent postcards to family and friends and a history of correspondence can be built over time if you can collect it all. War postcards are highly collected and valuable for both the censorhip aspect and also the philatelic interest regarding the war post offices that were temporarily set up to deal with all the letters to and from home.

Why Are Some More Valuable Than Others

Not everything stands the test of time and highly regarded and collected photographer’s work is competitive in the marketplace to the collector. Towns that have vanished from history but remain on postcards are an essential piece of history. Victorian postcards are highly prized because they demonstrate the emerging artwork from the time and the emerging printing technology from that time. If you are lucky enough to have seen them up close, they are a technical marvel to behold with the use of colour and design that was able to be produced in what was a rudimentary time for technology.

Rare postcards, like stamps, are those that are known by collectors to be few and far between in regards to availability. Also a card with rare postmarks or having travelled through a small town whose post office no longer exists are also highly collected.

Postcards are as complex as stamps in regards to collecting and value and it would be possible to mix the two mediums to build a wonderful collecton of philately.