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A History of Postcard Collecting

Synka | Dec 17, 2009 | 0 comments

Postcards have been a great way to communicate for over a hundred and fifty years now. Postcards have been a popular medium for so long due to a number of points. One such reason these days is the free postcard templates that you can locate on the web have made it inexpensive and easy to print and mail. What many don’t realize, however, is that postcard collecting is one of the largest hobbies in the world. Many people like to collect souvenir postcards from places they visit as a great way to visualize their past vacations.

Postcards initially started gaining followers in the late 1900′s, or thereabouts, when many countries around the globe started printing postcards with photos or images of their country’s most popularly visited places and landmarks. It was in 1889 when the first postcard featuring the Eiffel Tower appeared.

These days, there is virtually no limit your collection of postcards from almost every country around the world. Whether you are traveling to South America, North America, Europe, Asia or Africa, you can get souvenir postcards from there with beautiful landscape or other pictures of the places you visited on your trip.

Some of the souvenir postcards are worth a lot of money due to where they are from; the older the postcard the better its worth. There are people who narrowly focus their postcard collecting to only a particular region; some prefer a particular style of postcard, some prefer collecting postcards of a particular theme whereas others collect souvenir postcards from around the world in many different variations.

If you do a lot of traveling, postcard collecting could be a great hobby for you. You can simply purchase souvenir poscards from your various destinations, and in no time at all, you can build quite a collection. But if you are not much of a traveler but still have a hobby of collecting postcards, you can easily get them online. One o the best online source for postcard collectors is eBay.

Souvenir postcards include images or pictures of memorable buildings, expositions, vintage cars, trains, celebrities and sports personalities, historic figures and many other pictures. Many of the postcard collectors have a huge variety of collectables from years or decades past which can fetch a lot of money.

Those serious postcard collectorsshould be very very careful while preserving old postcards and make sure there is no damaged caused to them due to anything like environmental issues or rough handling. They should never be exposed to chemicals which may damage the post cards for ever.

Postcard collectors are often referred to as deltiologist (It originates from an ancient word which means collector of small pictures or writings).The turn of the 20th century saw a great splurge in postcards. Over a billion postcards were sold in a year in the United States alone.

You can find souvenir, antique or vintage postcards in numerous locations such as auctions, estate sales, even local flea markets or garage sales. You can also search for ads of postcards in classifieds in the newspapers from postcard collectors who want to sell their postcard collection to make some quick bucks. You might also like this resource if you are interested in or looking for Christmas postcards this holiday season.

Most postcards are printed on cardboard but you can find some vintage and old postcards printed on metal, leather and wood. These can be real keepers!