The above image is taken from The Postcard Age by Lynda Klinch and Benjamin Weiss (Thames & Hudson, £19.95). All the images in this book come from the collection of Leonard A Lauder, recently donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In his preface, Lauder explains his fascination with postcards.
Postcards open countless windows on to a broader collective past,” he writes. “An individual card makes a specific moment come alive in a vividly intimate way.
According to Klich and Weiss, the golden age of the postcard was the first decade of the 20th century. In 1909, for example, 833 million stamps for postcards were used in the UK alone. The postcard “craze”, they argue, was a phenomenon of the first great age of globalisation.
The international post system “smoothed the path for commerce and intellectual exchange and helped foster a broader sense that the cultures of Europe were entwined”. However, some observers at the time took a more jaundiced view of the popularity of postcards. In 1906, the American writer John Walker Harrington published an article entitled “Postal Carditis and Some Allied Manias”.
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[All images from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive—Promised gift of Leonard A. Lauder/courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, via Imprint]
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