Postcrossing Blog

I must confess that our jaws dropped when we received this report… as if Paris wasn’t stunning enough, Petitpilote managed to take the little ones on her flights with her, show them around the biggest airplane in the world and visit another 2 cities in the US!! Read on, for another adventure-filled report! :)

So if you’ve read our previous report, you know we were about to board a plane with our host Petitpilote, who is an air hostess on long haul flights.

July was her stand-by duty month so she could fly anywhere and the destinations would all be surprises both for her and for us! What a great experience! We always travel into envelopes and this time, we have flown inside a plane and seen the world around! And the first destination was…

… Boston, charming city of the USA!

Largest city and capital of Massachusetts, Boston was founded in 1630 and is one of the oldest towns of the United States. With many colleges and universities, the city is an international hub of education and a major cultural center as well. This is from the balcony of the Old State House in Boston that Thomas Jefferson read the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

The stopover was very short and by happy chance the hotel located downtown, convenient for a quick sightseeing around. We walked through the Little Italy district and then straight to the Marina to enjoy the waterfront atmosphere.

Weather was fair, lots of little boats were preparing for some sea trip. Looking through the spyglass, we have imagined incredible buccaneers and pirate adventures!

The second destination was Washington D.C.! The capital of the USA!

We were fortunate to fly into the big Airbus A380. Woooow… A double-deck airliner, the biggest plane in the world with 24 crew members and 516 passengers! And two little free-riders of course! :D

The Captain invited us to join the cockpit during the flight; we could sit on the instruments panel and experience interesting moments and a beautiful balcony view.

And while the ocean was evaporating at high speed under our wings, our host and his colleagues were ensuring the comfort and safety of passengers in the cabin.

Washington, here we are! No time to have some rest. Our host had again a busy schedule for us! For the first step, we have visited the National Postal Museum!

Image on the right by AgnosticPreachersKid at Wikipedia.

Dedicated to the postal history of the United States, the Museum offers many interactive displays and a big room with a permanent exhibit “moving the mail”.

On the road, through the rail and airmail, we have explored more than three centuries of postal old days. What a brilliant place! We have met lots of other international postboxes from the past!

There are many American institutions in Washington, such as the White House which is the official residence of the President…

… but also the Capitol where the Congress sits as well as the Supreme Court and other federal agencies.

After a delightful promenade under an agreeable sun, we made some stops in front of these remarkable spots. In the morning, with a head full of unforgettable memories, we left Washington back to France. We can’t wait to join our next adventure! Au revoir and see you soon!

Our huuuge thank you to Petitpilote for these wonderful reports! Never in a million years would we have imagined that the little ones would get to see the inside of a A380's cockpit! :D Onwards they go…

PS – Curious to know who won last weekend’s giveaway? The results are on the bottom of the Green Banana Card’s post!

The last time we heard from the Little Mail Carriers, they were knee-high in snow in Siberia, but that was a long time ago… We were wondering what they were up to, when we received this exciting report from Chicago! Turns out, they’ve just spent some time with Heather at the fantastic Curt Teich Postcard Archives!

We’ve written about their Greetings from postcards before, so we were curious to see what Little Paulo & Ana would discover “behind the scenes”…

Hi everyone!

In April we traveled to Wauconda, Illinois, in the far northern suburbs of Chicago. There we visited the Lake County Discovery Museum’s Curt Teich Postcard Archives—the world’s largest public collection of postcards! Our first stop was the mailbox located at the end of the drive. It was quite roomy and gave us a chance to stretch after the trip.

First we saw the reading room and library, which is open to the public. We decided to do a little research. Postcards are sleeved before researchers handle them, and we were only given a few at a time to look at. Pencils only for note taking!

Next we were given a behind-the-scenes tour. The core of the archives is from Chicago printer Curt Teich & Co (1898–1978). The Teich Company specialized in printing postcards, and saved copies of everything they printed. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, it was the world’s largest volume producer of postcards. The archives literally holds millions of postcards from the Teich Company and other publishers.

The postcards are stored in archival boxes in cabinets. There are a lot of cabinets to hold all of the postcards. The archives also has production files that were used to create the postcards. Some contain original photos, notes, artwork and samples of wallpaper, carpet, or products. This client sent a carpet sample to get the colors and pattern just right.

When we were there, postcards from the Detroit Publishing Company were just being entered into the computer database.

Many of the postcards are digitized on a flatbed scanner at the archives and made available online at www.idaillinois.org. While visiting the digitizer, we made some new friends!

Later, we headed over to the museum building to tour the exhibits. We saw what the original off-set press looked like (that’s Curt Teich Sr., company founder, on the right).

We also discovered a “Top Secret” map! Did you know that during the Second World War, the Teich Company had a contract with the United States Army Map Service for printing maps?

There are lots of different types of postcards on exhibit.

It was great to meet the staff and see how the postcards are cared for at a postcard archive. They love postcards!

P.S. May 5–11, 2013 is National Postcard Week in the United States!

What a fantastic trip – sounds like postcard heaven to us! Thank you for showing them around, Heather! :)

Now they’re off to their next destination… the adventure continues!

We can probably all agree receiving a postcard in the mail from an exotic faraway place is one of the more exciting things that might happen in a day… but did you know that some decades ago, a pharmaceutical company used this precise notion to come up with one of the most unique marketing schemes of all time? Read on – it’s a good story!

Between the years 1954 and 1968, Abbott Laboratories of Illinois sent out 240,000 postcards every couple of weeks to doctors, nurses, and health facilities all over the world. They manufactured, stamped, and postmarked over 170 unique postcards from 165 different towns in 85 countries. The postcards’ authenticity of origin intrigued the recipients, increasing their overall effectiveness.

Each card began with the salutation, “Dear Doctor, ” except for several versions sent to non-doctors that omitted this greeting and just had the message. The pictures on the cards displayed local scenes portraying the place, culture, or people of the particular country it was mailed from. The entertaining message on the back was written in a friendly tone, and never forgot to plug their prized product—an intravenous anesthetic by the name of Pentothal. This drug, by the way, is still used today not only for its anaesthetic effects, but also in some places for its truth serum properties!

It is a bit of a mystery how this novel idea originated. In an article by Daniel Friedman, one Abbott employee, Dean Carson, was quoted saying, “I just came up with this idea and they said it was fine.” Others speculate it was either the Abbott advertising executive, Tom Bird or Charless Hahn, the Chicago Sun Times stamp editor, who had previously collaborated on a magazine together advertising Abbott products to doctors in Latin America.

Whoever actually invented this genius marketing method back then probably didn’t fully realize the extent of popularity these postcards possess among present-day collectors. In September 2012, a bunch of Dear Doctor postcards were sold on eBay raking in hundreds of dollars for each card—the record price was $298!

Impressive, isn’t it?

By the way, the photos that illustrate this post come from the collection of Tom Fortunato, who graciously allowed us to use them. Tom runs deardoctorpostcards.com, a website for Dear Doctor postcard collectors – check it out!

Bonnie Jeanne (aka PostMuse) hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is passionate about snail mail, mailart… and postboxes! :) Come discover more about her on this Spotlight interview.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I discovered Postcrossing via Bookcrossing. I have been exchanging postcards most of my adult life, 30 plus years. When the Internet came about, I joined lots of online postcard groups, and that was fun, but often the exchanges were between the same group of people. I love the randomness of Postcrossing! I think that is the thing that most attracted me to the site.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I sew, and I do a lot of mailart. I also love to travel and visit museums, especially little known museums, like the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania. I’m also a backyard birdwatcher and enjoy the constant chatter of the birds while I sit on my patio and write postcards and letters.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

The mail chute is at work and I love using it. I only work three floors up, so I can actually hear the mail hit the bottom :)

The photo close-up (left) of my open mailbox at home is taken from the front. You can see how the back is also open so that in the winter I don’t have to go out on the snowy road to get my mail. A lot of people outside the US also don’t realize that we can leave our outgoing mail in our home mailbox for the mailman to take away. I leave LOTS of mail in my home mailbox.

The photo on the right shows my home mailbox in the spring. I do decorate my mailbox for seasons. In winter, I’ll string twinkling snowflakes on it and add a few other festive details. At Halloween it had a giant black spider with purple twinkling lights.

This photo shows postcards of my home mailbox inside the same postcard… very “meta”! :)

The metal mailbox is my post office box, where most of my incoming mail goes. I do get some mail at my home mailbox, but it is safer to have most of my mail go to my post office box … it is always dry, plus it is close to work, so I can get my mail before lunch and enjoy it while I eat.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

My favorite postcards are pictures of the sender’s mailbox, even if it is only a mailslot. Some of the recent ones I’ve received are NL-1247688, DE-1267457, DE-1251668 and TW-455583.

Sometimes people write on the back of regular postcards that their mailboxes are not cute or interesting enough for a postcard. But, I think ALL mailboxes are beautiful. They are our connection to each other, even more so than email because you can hold snail mail in your hand.

Have you inspired anyone else to join Postcrossing or start collections of their own?

Oh yes! A former coworker is now quite involved. As are my two oldest grandchildren. I help them with the project because they are only 5 and 3, so too young to write postcards. And I ramble on to whoever will listen about Postcrossing, at any opportunity :)

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

My very favorite part of the process is when I get an address of someone who welcomes mailart because I LOVE to make postcards.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

I am passionate about snail mail. I send about 40 or so pieces of mail a week and I love the connecting with other people. Somehow political/cultural differences don’t matter when one is writing to another about some shared interest, like fountain pens, or beekeeping, or novels, or the cute little bird that sat on the back of my patio chair and sang me his life story.

Thank you so very much for listening to me my Postcrossing story! And thank you very much for this wonderful site.

Since picture postcards were first created, they have been instrumental in documenting a locality’s history. Dating from 1905–1950, exaggerated and tall-tale postcards originated from the pioneer bravado of the western expansion and were extremely popular in the Great Plains and rural communities hoping to form an identity for themselves as a place of agricultural wealth.

These postcards promoted agrarian and wildlife benefits to a public that was aware of the exaggerations, and were used to facetiously advertise the products and unique aspects of a region. The common theme among the postcards was immensity; fishing, hunting and riding oversized animals, harvesting gigantic fruits and vegetables, or wheeling in massive sheaves.

While exaggeration postcards illustrated an object of disproportionate size, the tall-tale postcard added a caption, bringing the whole scene to life with anecdotal referential humor. The most well-know creators of these cards were Alfred Stanley Johnson, Jr., and William H. Martin. They created their masterpieces using trick photography, usually taking two black and white pictures, one a wide shot and the other a close-up. The enlarged close-up image was then cut and glued over the wide shot to create the embellished result.

Titles such as “Great Sport Fishing Here” and “Harvesting a profitable crop of onions in Kansas” helped further the intent of the image. Other designers painted their unlikely scenes or used a combination of photography and painting (an early day exercise in Photoshopping!).

Larger than Life: The American Tall Tale Postcard, 1905–1915 by Morgan Williams is a great volume on the exaggeration postcard, capturing “many facets of life in turn-of-the-century, small-town America and vividly bears witness to a unique form of creativity.” To check out more of legend William H. Martin’s work, visit http://www.photographymuseum.com/talltale.html.

By the way, all the images illustrating this blog post come from Brenda’s wonderful collection – check out her website for many more!