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The Picture Postcard As Souvenir And An Entangled Object An Entangled Object: Indeed, there is one who corresponds with me too, but he's so foolish that The Picture Postcard as he writes letters. Did you ever hear Souvenir and Collectible, about anything so ridiculous? As if I care for a good-for-nothing letter! I Exchange and Ritual cannot put a letter into my album, can Communication I? What nonsense! When I get a real boyfriend I will simply insist that he send me the nicest postcards there are Bjarne Rogan to be bought, instead of pestering me University of Oslo, with those dull letters. Norway (Reflections of an anonymous Nor- wegian girl, "Brevkort og Backfischer" 1903, 41) Abstract The picture postcard craze went hand in ne of the most striking con- hand with the rise of a new consumer cul- sumption phenomena at the ture, a more affluent society, and a new beginning of the 20th century O 1 middle class. Modernity is the common was the craze for the picture postcard. denominator and the frame of reference. The vogue started between 1895 and However, these cards served a multiplic- 1900 and faded out between 1915 and ity of uses and functions including as col- 1920. These two decades have been lectibles, ritual communication, and gift called the Golden Age of the picture exchanges, and were enmeshed in a tangle postcard, and with good reason. The of relationships. What characterized the hunger for cards seized both young and craze for the picture postcard a century ago old, males and females, in Europe and and guaranteed its enormous spread and the USA, and on other continents as well. popularity was precisely these enmeshed Except for the mania for the postage functions, concrete as well as symbolic, and stamp, there had never been up to that the many layers of meaning invested in the time a more pervasive and ubiquitous postcard. Few material items are more fad for a material item. Roughly aptly characterized as "an entangled ob- estimated, between 200 and 300 billion ject" than the picture postcard of the postcards were produced and sold 2 Golden Age. during this Golden Age. The Picture Postcard—an Icon of Mo- dernity The picture postcard has been the object of several studies. Its production and Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 1-27 ©2005 by The University of California. All rights reserved 1 Bjarne Rogan The picture postcard was collectible no. 1 for young girls. Norwegian postcard from 1910, entitled “From the Postcard Shop.” distribution, iconography, and semiotics sible to explain the enormous popular- have been analyzed by—among many ity of this non-essential material item and others—Carline (1972), Ripert and Frère the billions of cards sold and mailed ev- (1983), Ulvestad (1988), Schor (1992), ery year unless we also consider the card Bogdan and Marshall (1995), and Geary as an exchange object, a gift, and a mes- and Webb (1998). I have discussed the sage carrier. What triggered my curios- collecting of postcards during the ity about these things were (a) the fact Golden Age myself in three articles that my research material—present-day (Rogan 1999, 2001a, and 2001b). Never- collections of postcards from the Golden theless, research perspectives on the Age—often contain 50% or more of un- postcard phenomenon have tended to be used and unmailed cards, and (b) that rather narrow and removed from their the written messages generally contain broader social and cultural contexts. very little information. It struck me that Their iconography, representational and scholarly interest has concentrated on the ideological connections, production tech- picture side of the postcard, and that little niques, distribution networks, and col- work has been done on the significance lecting modes—however fascinating— of what is on, or not on, the other side of are only a part of the story. It is not pos- the card. In this essay, I shall look at both 2 An Entangled Object sides of the postcard, at the messages the humblest material artefact, which is inscribed by their users as much as at the the product and symbol of a particular imagery, and discuss these in terms of civilization, is an emissary of the culture exchange ritual and communication. out of which it comes" (T.S. Eliot 1948, Aesthetics and communication, ritual qtd. in Briggs 1988, 11). A century ago, and symbol, technology and business, the picture postcard meant much more, play and action, imagination and re- and very different things, than it does membrance, desire and materiality, com- today. It arose out of new technologies modity as well as subjective experience . and production processes, as a result of . There seems to be no end to the per- industrialization in the latter half of the spectives that may be applied to the pic- 19th century. The postcard craze was a ture postcard, even if few of us will go response to a new desire for things, cre- as far as Östman when he stated that, "I . ated by an unprecedented access to com- . maintain that small, nice, mostly val- modities for broader population groups. ueless picture postcards do have a very It was a response to a longing for color- important function not only for the study ful images, made possible by new repro- of what is at the bottom of our discourse, duction techniques. It was an answer to but even for a deeper understanding of modern communication needs as mass Man; the picture postcard stands—in a tourism began to take off on a burgeon- way—at the center of humanness" (1999– ing scale. Furthermore, it satisfied new 2000, 8). Östman himself approaches the leisure habits, like the collecting interests phenomenon through a discourse analy- of women—a group which until then sis of a functional-pragmatic kind; he is, had had few opportunities of finding an however, more convincing when it accepted outlet for such desires (actually, comes to the linguistic-textual analysis postcard collecting was started by than in understanding the postcard as a women). In short, the picture postcard material object and an agent of action went hand in hand with the rise of a new (e.g., as a collectible, a gift).3 An inte- consumer culture, a more affluent soci- grated theoretical approach would have ety, and a new middle class. All these de- been desirable, but is it really possible? velopments seem to have coalesced in So many different theories may be ap- the picture-postcard boom. Modernity is plied, depending on whether the focus the common denominator and the frame is on the postcard as a collectible, a gift, of reference. a souvenir, a medium of communication, etc. A Golden Age A holistic approach to the postcard should take account of the The illustrated postcard craze, like the embeddedness of the object in contem- influenza, has spread to these islands porary culture. My point of departure is [Great Britain] from the Continent, the postcard not "at the center of human- where it has been raging with consid- erable severity. ness" but rather as "an emissary of its culture," or as T.S. Eliot once put it: "Even (The Standard, 1899) 3 Bjarne Rogan The popularity of the picture postcard sumption—a conclusion that is based on rose steadily through the 1890s, as ap- the fact that most picture postcards from pearance, colors, and printing techniques these parts of the world are found in improved. From the turn of the century, European and American markets and the number of dispatched cards ex- collections today (Geary and Webb 1998). ploded. Europe was virtually flooded Specialized postcard shops and ex- with picture postcards; metaphors like change bourses grew up in most major "an inundation" and "the letting out of western cities, but cards could be bought waters" were used by the press, as well virtually everywhere. as terms like "influenza" and "pest." In The popularity of the picture postcard 1903, a British paper predicted that was due to several factors, which, ana- within ten years Europe would be bur- lytically, can be sorted into the follow- ied beneath postcards, as a result of the ing four groups. In practice however, any new "postcard cult." That year around card might fall into several of these cat- 600 million postcards were dispatched egories: in Great Britain alone. In Germany the number exceeded one billion, and the • The aesthetics of the card. As a same quantity is reported from the USA. cheap pictorial item in a world Japan lagged a bit behind, with only half where other colored pictures a billion. England passed the billion-card were still rare and expensive, the mark in 1906. It is estimated that seven motif in itself was of high impor- billion cards passed through the world's tance. The pictures gave visual post offices in 1905 (Carline 1972; Ripert pleasures, information about dis- and Frère 1983). tant places and famous persons, These numbers do not include all the opportunities for longing and cards that were bought and put into al- dreaming, and pretexts for dis- bums—as souvenirs or as collectibles— cussions in the family and con- without being mailed, during the Golden versations at social gatherings, as Age. The collecting zeal followed the for example in the very common same trend, and there is reason to believe habit of keeping postcard al- that the number of cards bought but not bums for guests to look at. Post- mailed was not very much lower than card albums were the "coffee- the enormous numbers that were put in table books" of the turn of the the mail. In 1900, The Times reported on century (Rogan 1999) and the this new collecting "mania," adding that cards, with their colorful visual it had not yet reached the same heights representation of the world, in Britain as it had in some other coun- symbolized modernity at large.
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