Postcrossing Blog

Oh, happy day — today is the day lucky postcard number 80 million has been received! Woohoo!

Whether you’ve sent just one postcard or many thousands of them, you’ve played a part in this achievement. Bravo, everyone! 👏 Also, we’re celebrating this milestone almost exactly 2 years after the last big milestone (70 million), so it looks like our trajectory is still very stable, with an average of 5 million postcards per year. Which is just brilliant!

80 million postcards is a lot of postcards though, and my mind is not quite able to visualize that many postcards… but this is where math comes in! Calculating the area of all these postcards, we know that they would be enough to carpet the Vatican with postcards two times and a half, or the area of the Forbidden City in Beijing over 1.5 times! Also, assuming each postcard weighs about 5 grams (0.17 ounces), all these postcards would weigh as much as 67 fully grown African elephants! 🐘

Now, we know what you’re really curious about: which postcard was the lucky 80 millionth, and who got the closest guess in our celebration contest? Without further ado…

Postcard number 80,000,000 was NL-5891077, sent by turtle_lover in the Netherlands on 23 December 2024 and registered on 07 January 2025 at 02:32:25 UTC by Flicki, in Germany!

And the sharpest guesser in our milestone contest? That honor goes to jennyfleur! You will receive a bonanza of papersisters prizes, including postcards, rolls of tape, stickers, a rubberstamp and more. But that’s not all! Runners-up dessie82, Emicho, Viiliaaa, Yunling, dhe and xxxxyyyyzzzz were just minutes off the mark and will also receive sets of lovely postcards and stickers to celebrate as well. Enjoy all these gifts, generously offered by papersisters!

No matter how many postcards you’ve sent or how long you’ve been a postcrosser, we hope you’ll take a moment to celebrate this milestone with us. Do a little happy dance, send an extra postcard, or share some Postcrossing joy with friends! This community thrives because of you — your love of connecting, sharing stories, and spreading a bit of kindness to mailboxes everywhere. 💌

And now, a brand new year unfolds ahead of us, with plenty of postcards waiting to be written. Let’s brighten mailboxes worldwide and come back to celebrate 90 million postcards in a couple of years!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉 As we step into 2025, we invite you to take a moment to reflect on the beauty and creativity that inspires us — and what better way than by sharing our favorite pieces of art?

Art has a magical way of connecting us to emotions, memories, and stories. Whether it’s a painting, sculpture, photograph, or even a doodle, art resonates differently with everyone. It could be something you’ve admired in a museum, a piece you’ve stumbled across in a small gallery, or even a cherished creation made by a loved one.

What makes it special to you? Is it the artist’s unique technique, the colors that seem to come alive, or the story behind the creation? Maybe it reminds you of a special time in your life, or perhaps it’s simply something that makes you happy every time you see it.

Feel free to share the details on the postcards you send out this month! If it’s a painting, what does it look like? If it’s a song or performance, what emotions does it evoke? Maybe you could describe how you first encountered it, or why it holds such a personal meaning for you. Art, like postcards, has the power to bridge distances and spark conversations — so let your favorite piece inspire your next card!

Here’s to a year filled with creativity, connection, and beautiful postcards. Happy writing, and may your postcards carry a little piece of art across the world.

Postcrosser Laridian is at it again! After the world map quilt from some years ago, they continued collecting bits of fabric, which were put together on a new quilt this year! It’s a gorgeous piece shaped like a heart, which Laridian wrote about on their blog:

My second Postcrossing quilt project is complete: The Heart of Postcrossing!

This has taken since 2021 to complete, as it relies entirely on fabrics generously sent to me by other postcrossers. More than 150 postcrossers sent fabric for me to use!

I started working on the Heart of Postcrossing as soon as I completed the World Map. But this time, I decided to go for something a little smaller scale. (The World Map is more than 2m / 7' wide!) I’d also hoped it would be completed faster than the World Map, which took about 3 years. As you can see, it took about the same amount of time for this one to complete!

All the colored fabrics were sent to me by postcrossers, most of them included with their postcards, but a few were sent from Postcrossing forum members who had heard about the project. Some of the white fabrics were also sent by postcrossers, but the majority of the white “outside” pieces are from my own collection. People don’t often send white fabric.

Getting a random piece of fabric this way was such a lovely surprise each time it happened. Often, the senders had stories to tell about the fabric: if it was local to their region, or a heritage textile; if it was leftover from some other project they’d worked on; if it was from a childhood dress or a husband’s work shirt. The histories and information about the pieces was inspiring, and I loved every piece of fabric sent to me.

Each square measures 2" / 5cm. The finished wall hanging is 42" / 1.06m square. The binding is in pink, red and yellow to match the colors of the fabrics. Due to the cutting and piecing process, each fabric may be found up to 4 times throughout the finished work.

Postcrossers from North and South America, Asia, Oceania, and Europe all contributed to this project. The country that “sent” the most fabrics was the United States, with 27 different fabrics coming from postcrossers there. Second was Germany with 21, and Russia was third, with 17 different fabrics.

Postcrossing has been such a wonderful and loved hobby for me, and I have “met” so many wonderful people through it. This quilt represents the diverse and and colorful people of Postcrossing, and the little triangles are the “postcards” flying away around the world to their recipients.

Below is a detail of some of the blocks. If you’ve sent fabric to me, maybe you see your fabric in there?

Here in Yorkshire, 'tis the season for some cosy reads. It’s chilly outside (…and sometimes inside), and the perfect time to curl up with a hot chocolate and a book. In this case, Sorcery & Cecelia, by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede. The book has the alternate title of The Enchanted Chocolate Pot (meaning something like a teapot, but intended for serving hot chocolate). It’s not a particularly wintery tale—in fact, it’s set during the London Season in the Regency period, which often meant the months from April to August. Even so, the fact that the plot partially revolves around a chocolate pot means I can’t help but keep thinking about cold days and hot chocolate… Plus, it feels like a very cosy story in general.

Sorcery & Cecelia is a very charming fantasy novel which is narrated entirely by a pair of cousins, writing to each other while one is in London for her first season, and the other remains at home. At first we just read about their day to day activities—new dresses and visits to local clergymen and all the sorts of things respectable young ladies did in the Regency period. But both of them start experiencing unusual events, and as their letters back and forth unfold it becomes clear that their mysteries are linked.

There’s a lot of affection in the cousins’ letters to one another, which is part of what made this such a cosy read to me. They do also each have a romance, which is a little predictable in a way (and one could wish that there were a few letters from the love interests as well, to help round things out)—but there can be something very cosy about that, as well!

The especially fun thing about this novel is how it was written, though! The two authors actually sent each other these letters, building the story up and twining the threads together as they went along. There is a genuine eagerness and excitement about some of the letters, I think, as the authors looked out for the next piece of the story. Obviously the finished product was then edited and tidied up to make it work well, but I still think some of the enthusiasm of the game has been preserved, and it’s great fun.

So if you’re looking for something cosy (whatever season it is for you!) I really think this might do the job. It’s very charming! And as ever, I’d love to hear about the books that feature mail/postcards/etc, fiction and non-fiction in the forum topic I created so people can chat about potential books to review. To view the thread and add your own post, you may need to log into the forum and spend some time browsing and participating in other parts of the forum first, if you haven’t used it before!

Tom Gauld is a Scottish cartoonist and illustrator. He is perhaps best known by postcrossers for The Snooty Bookshop: Fifty Literary Postcards, which celebrates more than a decade of his weekly cartoons in The Guardian.

Tom has authored many books—mostly books for grown-ups, but also one of Clarisse’s preschooler’s favorites. Tom’s newest book was recently nominated for what would be his second Eisner Award. But all the accolades haven’t made him too snooty to do an email interview with Clarisse (aka CStar9)! Phew!

Pretend you’re walking onto a metaphorical sports field as the star player for this interview. What psych-up music should we play?

I’ve only had to choose walk-on music once in my life, for a talk in Madrid at a fancy venue. I overthought it for weeks, swinging between cheesy and pretentious choices, but eventually I plumped for “Let’s Come to an Arrangement” by Martin Creed because it felt suitably upbeat and noisy in a funny, slightly weird way. Plus he is Scottish, like me.

What are some of the elements that define your work across your cartoons, graphic novels, children’s books, and more? In 5 words or less, what do you hope people take away?

I try to use the language of comics in new ways, while bringing in science, literature, lists, diagrams, games, and puzzles. I want my images to be clean and easy to read, but also to have a hand-made quality with a bit of wobble to the lines and hand-written text.

I don’t really have any kind of agenda or big plans to push. I just want to entertain the audience in a reasonably intelligent way and have them go away (in 5 words) “feeling a little bit happier.”

You’ve mentioned that your job is “to be silly about intelligent subjects.” Why books/literature, and why science?

The mercenary answer is that I get paid to draw on these subjects. The Guardian asked me to do weekly cartoons about books about 16 years ago. Then New Scientist hired me about 8 years ago to do science cartoons. But I don’t think they would have asked if there wasn’t something in my work already that suited the subjects. Certainly I couldn’t have made so many if I wasn’t interested in these subjects.

On some level, literature and science are both about trying to understand the world. There is enough in that (or in people failing to understand the world) to keep me going. Plus, new stories come up every week about advances in science or happenings in the literary world and these can inspire cartoons.

You submit a weekly cartoon for both The Guardian and New Scientist. What do you do about creative block? Is there a strip you can point to and say, that was HARD WON?

Weekly deadlines really help me avoid creative block. I have no choice but to hand in something by a certain day, so in a way, that frees me from feeling it has to be perfect.

Some weeks I can’t come up with anything that feels really good to me, so I just have to take my least bad idea and make it work as well as possible. And sometimes (quite often actually) I realise later that the ‘least bad idea’ was actually a pretty good idea. I just was too tied up in the creation to be a good, objective judge of its merits.

I have a cartoon called “My Library” which is a diagram where books on shelves are colour-coded into categories like “read”, “intending to read”, “pretend I’ve read” and “read, but can’t remember a single thing about it”.

I have a really clear memory of writing and rewriting those categories and feeling that it was a rather mediocre cartoon and saying to myself, “I’ll have to try extra hard next week to make up for this.” But then it was published and people related to it and found it really funny.

I’ve learned that as you rework a joke, you become overfamiliar with it and lose the initial unexpected spark of humour. But that spark will (hopefully) be there for the reader, so you’ve just got to trust that your past-self was onto something.

As for creative blocks on longer projects without weekly deadlines, which is something I struggle with: I don’t have an answer other than to just try to keep going.

What is your relationship to paper broadly, and specifically to postal mail? And, when can we expect your next postcard set?

I like making work that gets shared around. When I left college in 2001, we were still mainly promoting ourselves with printed stuff, so I made a few postcards to put in with orders for my mini-comics. People seemed to really like them, so I self-published a book of postcards called Robots, Monsters, etc. which outsold all my other self-published comics.

I’ve since made one other set of postcards myself. As you know, The Snooty Bookshop was properly published by Drawn & Quarterly. I’ll certainly do another at some point, but I have other projects queued up first.

Who would you say have been your main influencers? How does your work differ from theirs?

One big influence is Edward Gorey (who also did lots of postcards). I discovered his work in the library when I was studying at Edinburgh College of Art, and it just blew me away. He used the tools of comics and picture books in a unique and brilliant way. His work gave me permission to make comics without feeling I had to follow all the rules or fashions of the form.

I think I’m probably more interested in straightforward storytelling and jokes than Gorey was, but my drawing is definitely inspired by his, as is my interest in visual games.

What’s a hobby you love, or a new skill you’re practicing, outside of your work?

My wife’s father has an old house in the countryside which has lots of old dry stone walls, some of which were falling down. Over the last few years, I’ve been putting them back together. It’s extremely satisfying. I’ve fixed all of them now, but there are a few bits I want to redo. It’s fun to do something with my hands where I don’t also have to think about what I’m saying.

Tell us about your studio.

Some years ago, I was in a big shared workspace with lots of other creative people, but the area gentrified and sadly the landlord put the rent up too much, so we all scattered. I’m now in a smaller place with two other artists. I worked at home a bit over covid but I prefer having a separate place to go to work, and some company when I’m there.

In the studio, I have a drawing desk, a computer desk, a “thinking” chair, and lots of books. The room upstairs is let to a musician, so we sometimes get piano music and singing drifting down, especially in summer when the windows are open. It’s very nice.

What’s next for you?

I want to make a new graphic novel. Writing my previous ones (Mooncop and Goliath) was probably the hardest thing I’ve done. I think my brain is more suited to short cartoons, but I love the form of the graphic novel so I keep trying.

I’m continuing to make my two weekly cartoons, so work on other projects has to squeeze into the gaps and can be rather slow. But I’m excited about the possibilities of creating a longer story again.

You can explore more of Tom Gauld’s whimsical world on his website, Instagram, and Twitter. Dive into his weekly comic strips for The Guardian and New Scientist, or take a peek inside his studio to see where the magic happens. For aspiring cartoonists, Tom shares his journey and offers advice, while fans of his work can delve into the inspirations behind his beloved books, from the literary and scientific riffs in Revenge of the Librarians and Baking with Kafka to the heartwarming tales in his children’s book (which is SO GOOD!) The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess. And last but not least, don’t miss his reflections on crafting stories on the themes of nostalgia and isolation in his graphic novels Mooncop and Goliath.

And now, for the traditional giveaway! Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from Tom’s Snooty Bookshop or from his (sadly sold out) new set of cards to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, you have to tell us one book or scientific discovery you’d recommend to an alien visiting Earth — what would it be? Leave a comment below, and come back this time next week to check out the winners!