A History of the Postcard

The Eiffel Tower, 1893 World’s Fair, seaside towns, bawdy beach cartoons, George Orwell.

The world’s first government-issued postcards appeared in Austrian mailboxes in 1869. With a stamp imprinted in the corners, these corresponendz kartes set a standard that the U.S. adopted three years later with its UX1 one-cent postcards. Within the first two months, 31 million of these generic cards were sold—address on one side, blank space for the sender to write or illustrate a message on the other. And by 1875, the first of these postcards were allowed to sail overseas. Nonetheless, undecorated save for a simple border, these governmental cards were primarily a thriftier alternative to the letter rather than a statement of travel or culture.

The earliest color postcards were expensive to produce, and at first limited to entrepreneurs for advertising purposes. In the U.S., the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago gave rise to the first postcards printed for souvenir purposes, with building-adorned cards distributed to fairgoers. When the government allowed privately published postcards in 1898, the mass production of site-specific “viewcards” spread around the globe, redefining travel memorabilia and communication.

Innovations in printing at the turn of the century ushered in a “Golden Age” of novelty postcards. With the Eiffel Tower’s completion in the late 19th century, iconized images of the structure appeared in mailboxes around the globe.

Some of the most popular cards were cut into the shapes of objects relevant to holiday locales, which would open to reveal a strip of images of the town, and carried the stamp and address of the recipient on a mock luggage label tied to the card.

In Britain, with new steam locomotives providing a convenient link between the seaside and city dwellers, the picture-postcard became a staple of this new tourism. By the 1950s, the popularization of bawdy beach cartoon postcards — epitomized by the work of Donald McGill, who George Orwell coined “the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary postcard artists” — sparked state-led seizures of thousands of controversial cards from seaside towns.

In the decades since, though instant technology has overtaken postcards as the primary cheap and quick communication of choice, the ongoing nostalgia of a handwritten travel momento ensures their continued survival in train stations and gift shops the world over.

—Erica Berry