Do you send Easter cards? I never have until this year when I sent two Edwardian postcards with current first class stamps on to family. And that compares with maybe a couple of hundred Christmas cards. Plenty of Easter greetings folded cards are on sale in the shops, as the religious festival has been added Read More …

John Claydon’s Confessions of a collector part 4   Discovering postcard Art Nouveau (or Mucha do about nothing)   To mark the 100th anniversary of the first UK postcard in 1870, the V&A held a ground-breaking exhibition.  It turned out to be the critical motivating factor which led to the revival of postcard collecting as Read More …

April 6th 2020   John Claydon’s ‘Confessions of a collector’ part 3     While I was studying history at school and then university in the late 60s and early 70s, the second great age of postcard collecting had not quite established itself.  I acquired cards whenever I could, with the great benefit that I Read More …

April 2nd 2020 Confessions of a collector with John Claydon One of the contributions I used particularly to enjoy in PPM a few years ago was Michael Goldsmith’s diary of his experiences as a dealer. Most of us collectors come to savour the hunt for postcards almost as much as the postcards themselves, and so Read More …

April 1st 2020 Starting today, we’re publishing a daily blog for postcard collectors which we hope you’ll enjoy. They’ll be a mix of features, comment & fun, and we’d love your feedback, either as a facebook comment or by sending stuff we can include in a blog (by email: reflections@postcardcollecting.co.uk). The blogs initially are presented Read More …

Picture Postcard Monthly is stopping publication with the May 2020 edition. Publishers Mark and Sally Wingham of Chimes Publishing have taken the decision after the likely cancellation of all fairs for the foreseeable future sent projected advertising revenue plummeting. PPM has entertained and informed collectors for the past 40 years, and its demise – barring some Read More …

So that’s it for a while. I can’t see any postcard fairs taking place for quite a while. Fortunately there are other ways of buying cards without leaving your house, and I can see collections being pored over, re-arranged, added to, analysed and listed. It’s one way of getting over self-isolation. And how about sending Read More …

Just about any subject under the sun can be found on picture postcards, so it is no surprise to come across plenty of comic cards showing fish and chips. Real photo cards of shops selling them are pretty rare, though, and likely to sell for £30 upwards when discovered.  Perhaps they were not photographed very Read More …

While postcard dealers at fairs are busy trying to offload stacks of unwanted Edwardian postcards at anything from 10 to 50p each, the cost of a contemporary postcard from shops and museums seems to rise inexorably, with £1 a card being not uncommon. Postcards are still cheap compared with folded greetings cards, some of which Read More …

Most topographical postcards of the Edwardian period show a Britain in black & white or sepia. Indeed, these are the ones collectors like best, especially the pin-sharp real photographs produced by local publishers. Coloured postcards are rated less and are generally cheaper to acquire, but can be just as fascinating. Recently, inspired by the acquisition of Read More …