Ask Margaret
by Margaret Word Burnside
I miss receiving picture postcards from vacationing
friends. What happened?
In a word, the internet happened. It is a cheaper, faster
and easier way to communicate with multiple contacts at
once. Of course, the images in an email correspondence may
not be as spectacular as the professional ones on postcards,
and you may be subjected to additional photos of what
the sender ate for breakfast. In addition to reading more
details than you probably care to know about the pictured
pancakes and omelet, you are also apt to notice grammatical
mistakes and an overall carelessness that would not have
been the norm on personalized handwritten postcards.
Like you, I miss the excitement of finding a postcard
in the mailbox. It meant that the sender was thinking of
you enough to take the time and make the effort to select
the perfect picture, hand write a note and your address,
find and position a stamp on it, and locate a place to
mail it. Plus, it somehow made you feel like a part of the
vacation.
While on family trips, my sister, brothers and I would
dash up to postcard displays, then carefully make our
selections, as to who would receive which cards. We even
had reciprocal agreements with some of our friends to
re-exchange postcards following our respective trips, so
that we could save our own favorite remembrances of
where we had traveled.
The privately produced picture postcards you miss
should not be confused with the official mailing cards
issued by the Postal Service. No stamps are needed on
the government created cards, due to their pre-printed,
pre-paid postal indicia. These government produced
cards were called postal cards. Both postal cards, and the
private industry postcards, which appeared soon after
them, have been around for quite some time.
Image-free postal cards were first introduced in
Austria in 1869, when that country issued mailing cards
as a prompt, easy mode of communication for those who
had neither the time nor the inclination to write formal
letters. Other countries, including the United States, soon
followed suit. By 1873, our country was issuing postal
cards 3 inches by 5-and-one-eighth inches, which were
printed with a 1-cent postage mark. At a penny each,
the postal cards cost two-thirds less than the 3 cents it
needed to mail a letter at that time. Postal cards were an
140 TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE | MAY/JUNE 2017
P.W., Wesley Chapel
instant hit with more than
one million sold in 1875.
Many of these were used
by businesses to advertise,
by libraries to send overdue
book notices, or by banks to
confirm deposits.
B y t h e s t a r t o f t h e
20th century, postal cards
had become so popular for
use by individuals that their
senders were often criticized
for causing laziness, a loss
of proper letter writing skills
and the too easy dissemination of frivolous information.
This did not deter the use of postal cards, the usage of
which reached over 3.4 billion in 1950. History appears to be
repeating itself with today’s similar complaints about internet
correspondence.
The government’s postal cards featured two colors in 1956,
illustrations on the back (address) side in 1966, and pictures
on the front side in 1972. Limited edition 50-cent each postageincluded
cards with glossy pictures of our country’s landmarks
appeared in 1989. Sets of 10 to 20 cards imprinted with notable
works of art became available in 1994.
In January 1999, postal cards were officially renamed
“stamped cards,” a term which was expanded in 2007 to
“premium stamped cards” when they featured pictures of
artworks. The names weren’t the only changes. Prices per prestamped
card were raised to 1 cent above the regular postage
rate to cover the extra expense of color printing.
The privately printed picture postcards you inquired about,
which require postage to be added by the sender, date back
to at least 1861, when John Charlton, an entrepreneur from
Philadelphia copyrighted the idea of printing cards that could
be mailed. He eventually sold to Hymen Lipman, who was
unable to obtain a patent on the cards, which required regular
postage the same as that required to mail a letter. By the early
1870s, several competitors were also printing and selling their
own postcards.
Special souvenir postcards that featured images, considered
forerunners of later picture versions, were sold at the 1893