Post Cards
The top-selling post card of all time was said to be a drawing by Donald McGill 1875 - 1962 with the caption:
He: "Do you like Kipling?"
She: "I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled."
It sold about 6 million. Between 1904 and his death, McGill sold more than 350 million cards to users and deltiologists (picture post card collectors.
Post Cards
Deltiology is claimed to be the third largest collecting hobby next only to stamps and coins. Austria issued the first cards in 1869 followed by Britain in 1872. Values tend to be obscured by the philatelic elements.
Postcards
The year 1905 was a good one for getting into the postcard business,
for the penny greetings had by then become a mania that was racing across
the continent like some exotic strain of flu. "There is now no hamlet so
remote," wrote one wit of the raging craze, that it "has not succombed to
the ravages of the microbe postale universelle."
Incubated in Germany some 20 years earlier, the postcard germ, as social
commentators dubbed the fad, first appeared in America at the World's
Columbian Exposition in 1893. By the turn of the century the microbe had
become a ubiquitous infection, "postcarditis" was a favorite diagnosis, and
few American housholds were immune. Every town, city, and state saw to it
that its leafy green Main Street or highest peak made it onto a promotional
card; every family counting itself among the middle or upper classes
displayed on the parlor table an album bulging with images of the Sphinx,
the Eiffel Tower, and Niagra Falls. According to the Post Card Dealer, one
of several journals that popped up to report on the craze, one young suitor
even proposed marriage by penny postcard. Postcard "showers" enjoyed a fad
with friends who deluged an honoree with as many as 200 cards.
But amid all the good fun there were also excesses, including a case of
smuggling in which cards embossed with morphine and cocaine were mailed to
a New York prison. And in 1912, local postmasters were permitted to
confiscate some of the more risque cards, such as those showing "feminine
ankles, lovers in romantic attitudes, and pictures of animals 'portrayed
without fasionable attire.'"
Discovering America's Past
