ANSWERS ON A POSTCARD ...

A look back at the communications tool of its day, once lauded for affordability and simplicity

In the days before insta-everything and gurning for the 'Gram, there would plop through the mail slot a ray of sunshine — and the odd jolt of jealously — amid the bills and discount-dross flyers: a glossy missive with the grating refrain, “Wish you were here ...”

Increasingly shunned today, sitting forlorn in tatty tourist stalls if found at all, the vacation postcard was a poignant statement of affection — and a dose of humble-bragging to the homebound.

Its limitations, however, soon became obvious as the world got wired beginning in the 1990s. That postcard of you “having a ball in Havana” lost much of its impact when it arrived three days after your return to reality.

Now vacationers boast with unbridled bombast across social media channels such as Instragram and Facebook, posting polished selfies from the minute they touch down until the last sangria-soaked farewell.

But postcards were like the WhatsApp of their time, says the national Postal Museum in Britain — “short punchy messages accompanied by a picture.” It wasn't quite instant communication, but with up to 12 collections and deliveries a day in large cities during the height of the postcard craze in the Edwardian era (roughly from 1900 to 1920), it was more like email correspondence than the modern-day “snail mail” stereotype.

First introduced in Canada in 1871, followed by the United States two years later, the officially issued postcard reached its peak in the early 1900s, with billions mailed every year. Conceived by Austrian economist Emanuel Herrmann in 1869, the cheap messaging system soon spread from Europe to the U.K. and then to North America. And unlike formal letters, it required only basic literacy skills, thus putting correspondence in to the hands of the masses.

As the British newspaper the Standard noted archly in 1899: “The illustrated postcard craze, like the influenza, has spread to these islands from the continent, where it has been raging with considerable severity.”

Though originally blank — with space only for an address and a few lines of pithy prose — the postcard evolved to become an artistic palette bound only by designers' imaginations. From swaying-palm landscapes to royal visits and exhibitions, from humorous scenes to current events, the possibilities for the picture postcard were endless.

Inevitably, niche manufacturers joined the field. In Britain, in tandem with the expansion of working-class holidays to the coast, there arose one of the more peculiar aspects of this phenomenon: the “saucy seaside” postcard. A queasy mix of innuendo and smut, they relied on caricatures to make their rude themes more acceptable — but “seaside censorship boards” were always poised with a red pencil to strike out anything that hewed more salacious than saucy.

Elsewhere, postcards captured the human toll of natural disasters. In one such case cited by the Art History Archive, the Dallas flood of 1908, postcards recorded men in bowler hats sitting atop “floating train cars, waiting for help in the deluge.”

These snapshots provide rich source material for historians.

In Canada, a thriving postcard sector had been established by the turn of the 20th century. Firms such as W.G. MacFarlane of Toronto and Cloke & Son of Hamilton, among others, cranked out a total of 20,000 different postcards of domestic vistas. These included images of the mass immigration that opened up the Prairies, and the rise of mass tourism connected with grand railway hotels such as the Banff Springs.

Postcards really came into their own, though, during the First World War. An estimated six to seven billion were exchanged between soldiers and their loved ones — an average of nearly 1,000 per combatant. Sometimes all that was needed was a scrawled “OK.”

With the advent of the penny stamp, the postcard also linked the lovelorn — occasionally breaking hearts but never breaking the bank. Versions with Shakespearean sonnets and images of couples in passionate embrace flooded the market. The Victorians even devised a system of coded messages to hide their feelings from prying eyes, with writerly Romeos signalling their intentions by how they angled their stamps: tilted to the right could mean “I love you,” while tilted to the left might be asking, “Have you forsaken me, my darling?”

While its star has fallen, the postcard remains an object of fascination for collectors. Indeed, deltiology — as it's known — has been a popular hobby almost since the first card dropped on to the welcome mat. Some devotees, such as British photographer Martin Parr, seek out the offbeat. In his book, Boring Postcards, he has compiled a laundry list of the humdrum — airports, freeways, shopping malls, highway interchanges.

For their part, the curators at the Postal Museum in Britain — albeit a bit biased — suggest the postcard could be ripe for the same kind of revival as that enjoyed by vinyl records.

“In a time when technology can both connect and isolate us,” they write, “we may look to classic forms of communication. The postcard is an emotive, tangible representation of affection.”

Wish you were here, again? Why not.

In a time when technology can both connect and isolate us, we may look to classic forms of communication.