Postcards were first authorized by the United States Postal Department in the 1860s. Also called “Private Mailing Cards”, the earliest postcards had no images, just a message on one side and an address on the other. In the late nineteenth century, postcards were still so new that they included instructions on how to use them. One read: “If this card, you’d send by mail. Stick 2c stamp, here, without fail.” Some early examples are printed with advertisements describing the advantages of the new medium:
This Postal Card offers great facilities for sending
Messages or for rapid correspondence.
It is only about half the price of paper and envelopes.
It is ready for instant dispatch.
It is a convenient mode for ordering goods.
It is valuable to travellers, affording ready communication.
Other postcards were more idiosyncratic and humorous. In the UK, the oldest recorded postcard caricatures a cabal of postal workers gathered around a witchy inkpot, which the artist mailed to himself, leaving no doubt that the intended audience was not the addressee but the workers through whose hands the message would pass. The widespread use of postcards had a slow start, yet by the first decade of the twentieth century, the medium had taken off.
The Post Card Dealer, a short-lived magazine solely dedicated to keeping readers abreast of all things postcard, reported staggering annual numbers of specimens purchased and posted. In 1908, more than 667 million postcards were mailed in the United States; the New York postal service dealt with 200,000 postcards every week, and the New York Tribute reported a single ship that steamed into New York Harbor with 50,000 blank postcards in its cargo hold. The fad spread westward from Europe to the US, originating in the advanced printing facilities of Germany. But the largely European novelty cards were quickly imitated by US printers, eager to capitalize on the enthusiasm for mechanical postcards with intricate sliding panels and flaps that opened, postcards with transparent windows that could be held up to the light, and postcards that incorporated a baroque array of materials, from leather and silk to animal skins.