The Sunday Salon – In Which I Show You My Collection of Bookish Postcards

It’s been a long while since I last did a fun semi book-related post, so I thought today I’d take a moment to show you my collection of postcards (hat tip to Chachic, whose recent Postcard Love feature inspired this post). First of all, I should say that I didn’t exactly set out to start collecting bookish postcards – it’s just that I got into the habit of picking some up whenever I visited a new place, and since the majority of my interests are at least marginally bookish the collection ended up reflecting this. I also visit a lot of historical sites, but as social history features heavily in my reading, it all more or less ends up fitting the same general theme.

I collect postcards for a few reasons: first of all, they’re very inexpensive souvenirs. I usually travel on a budget, and more often than not a postcard is the only thing I can afford to pick up from a museum or gallery gift shop. Secondly, I love how postcards tell a story – they often portray or allude to something I’ve seen on my travels, and adding them to my collection helps me remember said thing better. And finally, I love that they can be used as bookmarks. I also collect actual bookmarks (and I haven’t showed you my collection in a while, so that will be the subject of a future Sunday Salon post), but I alternate between using them and just using a postcard. One of the things I like to do is match the bookmark with the book I’m reading, and all these literature- or history-themed postcards make that a lot easier.

I won’t show you my entire collection or else we’d be here all day, but here are a few of the highlights (you can click the images to enlarge them):


In this first photo we have a postcard with art by the wonderful Italian illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli, about whom I’ve raved in the past; one with storyboard art from Toy Story 2; and one with art by Ando Hiroshige, which I got at the amazing Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The second row has a fairy tale illustration from 1912 by Maginel Wright Enright, who happens to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister (the back doesn’t say which fairy tale, but the imagine immediately makes me think of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, which just so happens to be my favourite fairy tale); and two postcards from the National Library of Ireland: a 1812 colour engraving, and a painting by James Henry Brocas called “Man Reading”.


On the top and bottom left here we have two postcards from the Imperial War Museum in London: one is a classic WW1 trenches image, and the other a photo of child evacuees from WW2. They get used a lot when I’m reading war-related history or historical fiction. The others are all from an excellent exhibition of turn of the century photography which I saw at the National Photographic Archive in Dublin. As you can probably tell by now, my Dublin trip last year was particularly productive in terms of postcard acquisitions.


The top left one here is also from the National Photographic Archive in Ireland; then we have Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë from the National Portrait Gallery in London (it took a lot of restraint for me not to get about five hundred postcards there); and finally what I think of as my mini 60’s collection: a photo of The Beatles in Blackpool (which was actually purchased in Liverpool); an iconic Foyle’s photo of what happened only a few hours after the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted; and a free postcard advertising a club, which I kept because I liked the retro look of the photo.


These are all the result of what I fondly refer to as “That One Time I went to The British Library and went A Little Nuts at the Gift Shop”: the top and bottom left postcards are Mervyn Peake’s illustrations for “Snow White” and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; then there’s a facsimile of the Alice manuscript with art by Lewis Carroll himself; a 1950 drawing from the London Archive of Outsider Art; an illustration from “The Cat That Walked by Himself” from Kipling’s Just So Stories; a J.J. Grandville 1838 illustration for Gulliver’s Travels; and the first line of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.


The two on the left are watercolours by D.H. Lawrence, which I got when I visited his birthplace in Eastwood during my Erasmus exchange in Nottingham (I was completely convinced I had blogged about the visit, but I searched my archives and nothing. I don’t know what my past self was thinking). Then we have a Charles Robinson illustration for The Secret Garden, and the Arthur Rackham Peter Pan illustration my blog header comes from. As you can see, the print job on the postcard is rather poor and the colours are very washed out, but I couldn’t resist getting it anyway. The postcard with the dog on the top right has art by Catriona Hall, and it was purchased at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire (side note: I’ve only recently found out that this is where the latest adaptation of Jane Eyre was filmed, so now I want to watch it for this reason alone). Then we have an Edmund Dulac illustration for Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (acquired when I visited Haworth); and “Beauty and the Beast” by Walter Crane, from the Withworth Art Gallery in Manchester.


I really love the top left postcard in this photo: it’s a painting called “Two Women” by E. Harding, and I got it at the York Art Gallery. The one below it is a painting by Marion Adnams from the Manchester Art Gallery – also the location of Arthur Hughes’ “Ophelia”, which looks so much more impressive in person; if you’re ever in the city, make sure you visit it. Below it we have “The Return to the Front” by Richard Jack, a WW1 painting from 1916. I saw it at the York Art Gallery, and the actual painting is full of really moving details you can’t quite see here. Lastly, there’s “La Mort D’Arthur” by James Archer, also from the Manchester Art Gallery. They have an amazing collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and I know I got far more postcards there than the ones I can currently find. Probably some have been forgotten inside one of my books.


This is my locations collection: there’s the Japanese Gardens at Tatton Park, Knutsford (also known as “the real Cranford”); Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, which I visited last December; a watercolour of central Munich; the Trinity College Library in Dublin; an old picture of turn-of-the-century Chester; another watercolour, this time of York; and the stunning Lake District.


The ones in this picture were all free promotional postcards that I kept because I liked how they looked. The first is one of a series of Polaroid-like postcards with literary quotes promoting the 2010 edition of the Manchester Literature Festival; the one below is from the Liverpool John Moores University Library Special Collections; and the bottom left one is an OED postcard (who could resist that?). Then we have one advertising a Vintage and Craft Fair (in case you’re curious, I went), one for an Edinburgh Fringe play I didn’t go to, and finally one from the Science Museum in Lisbon.


The very last picture has the postcards I currently keep outside, decorating my shelves: an official Fringe 2011 one and also one for the stage adaptation of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase I saw; a watercolour of Haworth Village; a drawing by Lily Greenwood, purchased at the Manchester Crafts and Design Centre; a photo of a cat at a window in Lisbon; and two more from The British Library: more art by Mervyn Peake, and a 1892 science fiction illustration by Albert Robiga.

Phew! I turns out that even just the highlights took far longer to describe than I expected. I hope you enjoyed having a peek at my collection, though. Do you collect postcards too? What are some of your favourites? And if not, is there anything else that you collect?