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If we were to run out of postcards ...
Let's start with money. Wouldn't it be boring if the world only used Euros? Here's the story: everyone saves something. It starts with "let's not throw that away," moves into keeping all that in a box, graduates into a collection, and winds up as an obsession. Sound familiar? And we're not just talking about postcards, but all other paper ephemera the world has to offer.
Over time, we have stuff we either saved or got from others. Paper money, yes, as you travel, it's inevitable you'll have a few notes left over. And what about cigarette pack labels, hotel "do not disturb" signs, boarding passes, luggage claim tags, matchbooks, ticket stubs, newspaper headlines (or even entire newspapers), and so on? Look what's happening. As smoking becomes illegal in restaurants and bars, who gives away matches any more? Airlines have gone paperless, or they use computer-generated receipts and tags that fade away a month later. Newspapers crumble. Really, try saving old newspapers.
Well, here's the dilemma. We have lots of these, and we wouldn't mind putting them up for sale. But the website is called GlobalPOSTCARDsales and not GlobalPAPERsales. Changing the name or opening a new site are not options. Scanning large items can be a problem. eBay and similar auction sites are there, but everyone else does that, and the competition is fierce. (Who knew that all 2000 people on the flight from Nairobi to Kinshasa in 1968 saved their boarding passes and now want to sell them for $1 each?) Mailing matchbooks is now impossible, as is putting them into any kind of luggage. Woe is us. The domestic market here in Hong Kong is definitely not going to support this fantasy. So we will stick with postcards and carry on with the many thousands we still need to scan and enter.
Footnote about the money in the photo: we know it's hard to see into the scan, but the serial number on the Madagascar banknote, which came directly from circulation, is A000001. See the denominations of the Burmese kyat notes (15 and 90), and the Hong Kong one cent note--in a city where $100 seems to be the basic unit now. And you are also looking at rarely seen currency from North Korea--but that's another story.
(34800170) (RO-47430) Bucuresti - Metro Network Map (Goloh)_1.jpg "Internet Postcards")
Internet Postcards
Once upon a time (don't you enjoy stories starting like this?) if someone wanted a postcard they went out and bought it from a shop. Maybe a drugstore, maybe a stationery store, maybe a bookshop, maybe--usually--a tourist shop on the beach, near a mountain, somewhere. Early in the 20th century, a sub-genre of cards emerged: self-commissioned photos of the exteriors and interiors of private homes and of their families. These real photos almost always say "Post Card" on the back and were indeed meant to be mailed. These gradually fell out of style, leaving the market as it was. Until now.
We have mixed feelings about new cards that can be ordered over the internet. No, we are not competing with those companies. Yes, many of them have high-quality cards. But by definition they are not readily available to anyone, and we notice from our own stock that many lack informative captions or any other kind of identification. And they often supply a range of cards with generic photos not from their own country. You want every (fill in any topic) in the world? Go to (anytopicpostcard).com and buy them all at once. What fun is that?
With some internet sites, you buy from their stock. With others, you can supply the photo. Actually, if you have a lot of friends, and the interest to send lots and lots of cards, what's wrong with that? Take our illustration for this blog entry as an example: it's the Bucharest Metro system, and it's an internet card. We have no idea whether ordinary postcards of that map are available in Romania or not. Here in Hong Kong, we have no such commercial postcards of our MTR system. Just why that is, we don't know. The lines aren't changing all that fast, and an MTR map would make a nice change from photos of Victoria Harbour or The Peak. Are Hong Kong MTR postcards available online? Yes, but (A) only in China, and (B) you need to be able to read Chinese to order them. Russia and Ukraine in particular also have substantial selections of their own.
Global Postcard Sales includes some--not all that many--used internet cards in the site. We don't always know which cards were internet-sourced and which weren't. Sometimes, stamps or writing or postmarks obscure the information. Sometimes, there is no attribution. So we include them, because at some point enough people have ordered them from the source that they appear in quantities equal to or greater than limited-distribution ordinary commercial postcards.
Now, all we need is a bit of money and some good ideas to start producing our own!
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