Guinea pigs in the mailbox as a souvenir
Today, many send electronic greetings in real time from vacation. And yet the good old postcard is far from obsolete. Post with original motifs in particular gives the recipient small moments of happiness.
Beautiful but rare – greetings by postcard
You rarely get holiday greetings on a postcard these days. Many prefer to use their smartphones and send a Whatsapp. Most recipients are more happy about the mail they can touch.
FFor many people, postcards are the best souvenirs in the world. They are exciting, cheap and easy to use. Compared to the electronic media, they seem pleasantly old-fashioned in their analogue way. And they are very personal: handwritten postcards that are fished out of the letter box give the recipient little moments of happiness.
Especially when the subject is original. Instead of a map with world-famous sights, those at home are guaranteed to be more happy about alternative motifs such as special animals, culinary specialties or bizarre country clichés – be it guinea pigs from Peru, elephants from India, red wine drinkers from France or traffic jams from Bangladesh.
There is a surprise behind some of the cliché motifs. For example behind the guinea pigs on the map from Peru. They may look cute, but they are not cuddly toys in the country, but a delicacy. It is specially bred giant guinea pigs, the cuys, that end up on the plate in the Andean regions of South America, 65 million each year in Peru alone.
Original postcards like this one with guinea pigs from Peru are among the most beautiful souvenirs
Source: Catherine Koppenwallner
Eaten in the country for over 3,000 years, the meat is tender and resembles roast rabbit. Cuys are usually baked or grilled whole. In everyday cooking, as a celebratory meal at weddings and now also in upscale restaurants, where sometimes just a single leg is served on a mirror made of cornmeal.
Guinea pigs are a lot more unusual as a postcard motif than photos of the Peruvian World Heritage Site Machu Picchu, and the Cuys also offer enough material for a really original postcard text.
Postcards quickly became objects for collectors
Officially, postcards have been around for a good 150 years. The idea came from the later German general post director Heinrich von Stephan. His suggestion of an easy-to-send postal sheet was initially unpopular because of its open legibility and the resulting moral concerns.
In Austria, these problems were not seen and the so-called correspondence card was introduced in 1869, at that time without a picture. Germany followed suit in 1870. 45,000 tickets were sold in Berlin on the very first day. Finally, one no longer had to write complicated, long letters full of phrases and politeness.
In Austria, the so-called correspondence card was introduced in 1869, at that time without a picture
What: pa/akg-images
As early as the 1870s, the first cards with drawings and city views printed on them came onto the market – and the postcard was born. In 1900, the Reichspost transported a billion postcards, and by 1913 the number had grown to two billion – that was 30 postcards per inhabitant!
Postcards quickly became collectibles, an area now known as Philokartie. At the end of the 19th century, about 60 factories in Germany were producing scrapbooks for postcards. There were trade journals and associations such as the World Association for Postcard Collectors, which is why the period from 1897 to 1918 is also known as the “golden age of postcards”.
Original motifs adorned postcards early on, as this example from 1908 shows
Source: pa/Helga Lade Photo Agency GmbH, Ger/Thomas Huth
Today there are significantly fewer postcards, in 2019 around 60 million copies of all colors were printed across the EU. Of particular interest to philocartists are the so-called maximum cards, on which there is a maximum of correspondence between postcard, postage stamp and postmark in terms of motif, location and time.
The perfect guinea pig postcard from Peru would be franked with a guinea pig stamp and would have a matching postal special postmark with a guinea pig motif. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I visit Peru.
Even if not as many postcards are sent as in the past, you can still buy them everywhere
Source: pa/r. Goldman/Ralph Goldman