This is the first article in a three-part series.
At the turn of last century, two new crazes gripped many all over the world: sending postcards and collecting postcards (some did both). This reflected the craving for easy, fast and cheap communication latent in human beings, eminently social animals with irrepressible urges ‘to be in touch’.
Postcards soon turned into the Victorian and Edwardian Facebook – just as popular, often not quite as insipid.
When first conceived, postcards seem to have had just one function: to transmit a brief message and an image at a fraction of the price of an ordinary letter. That was the plus. On the minus side were stacked the lack of privacy – anybody could read the message, and the brevity of the message – just a few words.
But then people got creative and scores of other uses for postcards, certainly unintended at first, were devised.
This three-part feature will illustrate some of the ‘unusual’ uses Malta postcards were put to in early times. By far, the bulk still aimed at the transmission of personal messages, but surprising collateral uses soon emerged, like trade advertisements, promotion or commemoration of events, band club musical programmes, political propaganda, first-day ‘covers’, Christmas or new year’s cards, menus, sports rivalry, satire, invitations – even as bespoke notices of deaths and obituary cards. You mention it, it’s probably there.
(To be continued on July 20)