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An Entangled Object

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Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 1-27©2005 by The University of California.All rights reserved

An Entangled Object:

The Picture Postcard asSouvenir and Collectible,

Exchange and RitualCommunication

Bjarne Rogan

University of Oslo,

Norway

Indeed, there is one who correspondswith me too, but he's so foolish thathe writes letters. Did you ever hearabout anything so ridiculous? As if Icare for a good-for-nothing letter! Icannot put a letter into my album, canI? What nonsense! When I get a realboyfriend I will simply insist that hesend me the nicest postcards there areto be bought, instead of pestering mewith those dull letters.

(Reflections of an anonymous Nor-wegian girl, "Brevkort og Backfischer"1903, 41)

One of the most striking con-sumption phenomena at thebeginning of the 20th century

was the craze for the picture postcard.1

The vogue started between 1895 and1900 and faded out between 1915 and1920. These two decades have beencalled the Golden Age of the picturepostcard, and with good reason. Thehunger for cards seized both young andold, males and females, in Europe andthe USA, and on other continents as well.Except for the mania for the postagestamp, there had never been up to thattime a more pervasive and ubiquitousfad for a material item. Roughlyestimated, between 200 and 300 billionpostcards were produced and soldduring this Golden Age.2

The Picture Postcard—an Icon of Mo-dernity

The picture postcard has been the objectof several studies. Its production and

Abstract

The picture postcard craze went hand inhand with the rise of a new consumer cul-ture, a more affluent society, and a newmiddle class. Modernity is the commondenominator and the frame of reference.However, these cards served a multiplic-ity of uses and functions including as col-lectibles, ritual communication, and giftexchanges, and were enmeshed in a tangleof relationships. What characterized thecraze for the picture postcard a century agoand guaranteed its enormous spread andpopularity was precisely these enmeshedfunctions, concrete as well as symbolic, andthe many layers of meaning invested in thepostcard. Few material items are moreaptly characterized as "an entangled ob-ject" than the picture postcard of theGolden Age.

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distribution, iconography, and semioticshave been analyzed by—among manyothers—Carline (1972), Ripert and Frère(1983), Ulvestad (1988), Schor (1992),Bogdan and Marshall (1995), and Gearyand Webb (1998). I have discussed thecollecting of postcards during theGolden Age myself in three articles(Rogan 1999, 2001a, and 2001b). Never-theless, research perspectives on thepostcard phenomenon have tended to berather narrow and removed from theirbroader social and cultural contexts.Their iconography, representational andideological connections, production tech-niques, distribution networks, and col-lecting modes—however fascinating—are only a part of the story. It is not pos-

sible to explain the enormous popular-ity of this non-essential material item andthe billions of cards sold and mailed ev-ery year unless we also consider the cardas an exchange object, a gift, and a mes-sage carrier. What triggered my curios-ity about these things were (a) the factthat my research material—present-daycollections of postcards from the GoldenAge—often contain 50% or more of un-used and unmailed cards, and (b) thatthe written messages generally containvery little information. It struck me thatscholarly interest has concentrated on thepicture side of the postcard, and that littlework has been done on the significanceof what is on, or not on, the other side ofthe card. In this essay, I shall look at both

The picture postcard was collectible no. 1 for young girls.

Norwegian postcard from 1910, entitled “From the Postcard Shop.”

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sides of the postcard, at the messagesinscribed by their users as much as at theimagery, and discuss these in terms ofexchange ritual and communication.

Aesthetics and communication, ritualand symbol, technology and business,play and action, imagination and re-membrance, desire and materiality, com-modity as well as subjective experience .. . There seems to be no end to the per-spectives that may be applied to the pic-ture postcard, even if few of us will goas far as Östman when he stated that, "I .. . maintain that small, nice, mostly val-ueless picture postcards do have a veryimportant function not only for the studyof what is at the bottom of our discourse,but even for a deeper understanding ofMan; the picture postcard stands—in away—at the center of humanness" (1999–2000, 8). Östman himself approaches thephenomenon through a discourse analy-sis of a functional-pragmatic kind; he is,however, more convincing when itcomes to the linguistic-textual analysisthan in understanding the postcard as amaterial object and an agent of action(e.g., as a collectible, a gift).3 An inte-grated theoretical approach would havebeen desirable, but is it really possible?So many different theories may be ap-plied, depending on whether the focusis on the postcard as a collectible, a gift,a souvenir, a medium of communication,etc.

A holistic approach to the postcardshould take account of theembeddedness of the object in contem-porary culture. My point of departure isthe postcard not "at the center of human-ness" but rather as "an emissary of itsculture," or as T.S. Eliot once put it: "Even

the humblest material artefact, which isthe product and symbol of a particularcivilization, is an emissary of the cultureout of which it comes" (T.S. Eliot 1948,qtd. in Briggs 1988, 11). A century ago,the picture postcard meant much more,and very different things, than it doestoday. It arose out of new technologiesand production processes, as a result ofindustrialization in the latter half of the19th century. The postcard craze was aresponse to a new desire for things, cre-ated by an unprecedented access to com-modities for broader population groups.It was a response to a longing for color-ful images, made possible by new repro-duction techniques. It was an answer tomodern communication needs as masstourism began to take off on a burgeon-ing scale. Furthermore, it satisfied newleisure habits, like the collecting interestsof women—a group which until thenhad had few opportunities of finding anaccepted outlet for such desires (actually,postcard collecting was started bywomen). In short, the picture postcardwent hand in hand with the rise of a newconsumer culture, a more affluent soci-ety, and a new middle class. All these de-velopments seem to have coalesced inthe picture-postcard boom. Modernity isthe common denominator and the frameof reference.

A Golden Age

The illustrated postcard craze, like theinfluenza, has spread to these islands[Great Britain] from the Continent,where it has been raging with consid-erable severity.

(The Standard, 1899)

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The popularity of the picture postcardrose steadily through the 1890s, as ap-pearance, colors, and printing techniquesimproved. From the turn of the century,the number of dispatched cards ex-ploded. Europe was virtually floodedwith picture postcards; metaphors like"an inundation" and "the letting out ofwaters" were used by the press, as wellas terms like "influenza" and "pest." In1903, a British paper predicted thatwithin ten years Europe would be bur-ied beneath postcards, as a result of thenew "postcard cult." That year around600 million postcards were dispatchedin Great Britain alone. In Germany thenumber exceeded one billion, and thesame quantity is reported from the USA.Japan lagged a bit behind, with only halfa billion. England passed the billion-cardmark in 1906. It is estimated that sevenbillion cards passed through the world'spost offices in 1905 (Carline 1972; Ripertand Frère 1983).

These numbers do not include all thecards that were bought and put into al-bums—as souvenirs or as collectibles—without being mailed, during the GoldenAge. The collecting zeal followed thesame trend, and there is reason to believethat the number of cards bought but notmailed was not very much lower thanthe enormous numbers that were put inthe mail. In 1900, The Times reported onthis new collecting "mania," adding thatit had not yet reached the same heightsin Britain as it had in some other coun-tries. Within less than a decade, however,the mania had spread all over theworld—even if the picture postcard busi-ness in Africa and Asia was probablyintended mainly for Western con-

sumption—a conclusion that is based onthe fact that most picture postcards fromthese parts of the world are found inEuropean and American markets andcollections today (Geary and Webb 1998).Specialized postcard shops and ex-change bourses grew up in most majorwestern cities, but cards could be boughtvirtually everywhere.

The popularity of the picture postcardwas due to several factors, which, ana-lytically, can be sorted into the follow-ing four groups. In practice however, anycard might fall into several of these cat-egories:

• The aesthetics of the card. As acheap pictorial item in a worldwhere other colored pictureswere still rare and expensive, themotif in itself was of high impor-tance. The pictures gave visualpleasures, information about dis-tant places and famous persons,opportunities for longing anddreaming, and pretexts for dis-cussions in the family and con-versations at social gatherings, asfor example in the very commonhabit of keeping postcard al-bums for guests to look at. Post-card albums were the "coffee-table books" of the turn of thecentury (Rogan 1999) and thecards, with their colorful visualrepresentation of the world,symbolized modernity at large.

• The card as a souvenir. The enor-mous number of all sorts of cards(apart from collections strictlyspeaking) secured for posterity

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in chests and drawers, in recessesand attics, tells its own tale aboutthe drive to uphold the memoryof persons, places, and events.All the congratulations cards, buteven more the large quantities ofcards with local and tourist mo-tifs, testify to their value as sou-venirs—souvenirs of persons, ofplaces where someone lived, ofsites visited, or of travels under-taken.

• The card as a collectible. A new col-lecting vogue, that of picturepostcards, swept over the West-ern world around 1900. The or-dinary collector once more hadaccess to a new, cheap, and ubi-quitous pictorial item, as in theearly days of stamp collecting. Inthe first years, collecting post-cards was primarily if not exclu-sively the hobby of young girlsand women. There were evencollector clubs for ladies only.From around 1905 the men en-tered the scene and took over theclubs and the journals, whichproliferated during the GoldenAge.4 Close reading of advertise-ments in British postcard jour-nals confirms that in 1900 thegreat majority of collectors werewomen. A similar reading in1906 shows that men had takenover, outnumbering the womenby about five to one (Carline1972, 66). However, albums thathave survived and other scat-tered evidence indicate that post-card collecting on a more mod-

est scale remained a predomi-nantly female activity (Rogan1999, 2001a). Women collectedmotifs like views, landscapes,portraits, and works of art, butmen started when more modernmotifs appeared, like humorouscards, actresses and "posed beau-ties," ships, locomotives, andother tourist and transport top-ics. Serious postcard collecting(as opposed to other postal his-tory collecting, i.e., stamps andphilately) claimed aesthetic ide-als rather than serial or taxo-nomic and scientific ones. In thecollector's journals, the new, se-rious (male) collectors sharplycriticized the old (female) prac-tice of filling up albums haphaz-ardly. The new (male) élite ad-vocated specialization, the intel-ligent selection of beautiful orinteresting cards, and annotatedalbums (Rogan 2001a, 2001b).

• The card as a means of communica-tion. The driving force behind thepostcard, from a postal historypoint of view, was the need for apractical, cheap, and quick me-dium for sending short, simplemessages. Writing letters was forthe élite, not for ordinary people,and for women more than formen. The telegraph, introducedin the 1860s, was until aroundWorld War I an expensive wayof communicating, mostly usedfor business purposes. The resis-tance to open messages that any-one could read was strong—not

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least in the upper class, letter-writing milieus, but also frompostal authorities. It graduallydiminished, however, from the1870s on, steadily allowing morespace on the postcards for thepicture and the message.

The above factors—the cards as aestheticobjects, as souvenirs, as collectibles, andas a communication medium—may betermed the "pull" factors. To this shouldbe added some "push" factors, i.e., therapidly expanding postcard industry, thepublishers, agents, and sellers, their ad-vertising and efforts to sell their prod-ucts.5

The Rise and Fall of an Industry

The postcard industry became a big busi-ness that quickly created finely meshed,worldwide networks. It became a majoreconomic sector, employing in Francealone around 30,000 persons by 1900(Schor 1992). However, Germany wasthe leading country for postcard produc-tion from late 19th century until around1910. Hundreds of German companies,some with several factories, producedbillions of cards every year. Some of thelarge postcard factories employed asmany as fifteen hundred workers. Aboutthirty of these German firms expandedinto the international card market, pro-ducing cards with motifs from Norwayto the Pacific. Pre-1910 North Americanpostcards were produced mainly in Ger-many, as were most cards with motifsfrom the British Empire. Competitionwas fierce among the producers, and in-dustrial espionage was common; secu-

rity became a major concern, with fac-tory workers sworn to secrecy and visi-tors kept to a minimum. Each factory de-veloped unique color formulas that wereclosely guarded as trade secrets and of-ten protected by patents and trademarkregistration (Woody 1998).

As the types of cards grew morenumerous, many firms specialized inproducts for the tourist industry (Grussaus–, Greetings from-, Souvenir de–, Hilsenfra- cards, and later types), collector's sets,etc. With the economic potential in localview-cards, some German firmsaccepted millions of small contracts fromlocal clients to document localities—thuscreating a historical visual record thatencompassed the world. Also, thedevelopment of small, inexpensivecameras permitted amateurphotographers to make their ownphotographic postcards; smaller pictureswere sent in with mail-order postcardcontracts, rephotographed at thefactories and conformed to the standardsize of postcards—a practice that hasbeen revitalized in the last decade.

The success of the German postcardindustry in the early years of the 20thcentury was due partly to low labor costsbut mainly to its hegemony in printingprocesses. After 1910, the skills of theGerman printing industry were dis-persed when many young printers emi-grated to Great Britain, the United States,and elsewhere. But towards World WarI, the Golden Age of the postcard wasapproaching its end. The reasons arecomplex, but the war itself was a mainfactor: international as well as nationaltourism declined markedly, and indus-trial wartime production was directed

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towards more essential, non-luxury ob-jects. When peacetime trade resumed,most postcard companies were out ofbusiness. The reduced demand for post-cards after the war was not only due tonew communications media like the tele-graph and the telephone. Another im-portant factor was that the collectingmania was over or its focus had movedon to other items (Woody 1998).

If Germany was the leading postcardproducer, British publishers were moreactive on the distribution side, import-ing cards from Germany and distribut-ing them through their worldwide net-works. As for aggressive advertising, theBritish postcard publishing companyRaphael Tuck and Sons offers a case inpoint. When Tuck began publishingpostcards in 1898–99, they launched acompetition with big prizes to those whocollected (or rather hoarded) the great-est number of their cards within thespace of two years. Duplicates were ac-cepted as long as they bore different post-marks. When the entries were judged,the first award went to a lady from Nor-wich who submitted over 20,000 cards.Another lady received a special awardfor a collection of over 2,000 cards fromone single series. In a new competitionin 1904, it was once again a lady whowon the first prize for having collectedover 25,000 Tuck's cards, but this timewith a gentleman in second place. Theenormous quantity of postcards pro-duced, sent, collected, or simply keptcreated a serious problem: how to dis-pose of them. Among other things, theuse of postcards for papering walls wasadvocated (as had been done fifty yearsearlier for postage stamps). In 1906, Tuck

made the disposal of postcards the sub-ject of their third and largest competition,with the title "Home Decoration." Prizeswere awarded for the best use of post-cards for decorating tables, screens, cup-boards, overmantles, etc. The first prizewas given for a table mosaic, the secondfor a screen creation, the third for a decor-ation of bellows. All the prizewinnerswere ladies (Carline 1972, 64, 69).

There is not enough space here to dis-cuss all the different types of cards thatpoured onto the market. Generallyspeaking, the earliest cards (the "pre-postals") were congratulations cards,then came topographical cards (touristand local cards) and art reproductions,comic cards, erotic cards, and a long listof types of topical cards. What strikes anobserver today is the way that types andfunctions crossed each other. There werefor instance specialized seasonal greet-ing cards (for Christmas, Easter, Whit-suntide, for birthdays, etc.), but a touristcard, a portrait, a summer scene, or ahumor card could also serve as a Christ-mas or a New Year's card. During theGolden Age, every sort of card might beused for almost any purpose. It seemsas if the message (however insignificantit might be, see below) was just as im-portant as the motif and the occasion.

Topographical Cards: The Local Cardand the Tourist Card

Two of the most voluminous categoriesof postcards, to the extent that they maybe distinguished from each other, werethe local cards and the tourist cards. Lo-cal postcards depicted various themes ofspecial interest or immediate importance

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to local consumers, i.e., the inhabitantsof a region, a town, or a village. Build-ings, streets, markets and fairs, shops, oreven the interiors of shops were typicalmotifs, as were activities of every sort onthe local level. Factories, even smallplants and workshops in the countrysideor the village, were favorite themes. Thesmall dairy factory, the local winecooperative, the village vinegar or potatostarch factory, and the local sulphur orbone meal factory were topics thatabound in French collections, as do theschool house, the first automobile in thevillage, the policeman, the postman, themilkman, etc. In Norwegian collections,harbors, scenes from fisheries and whal-ing, the canning industry, etc., play thesame role. The variety of local cards isamazing, and there is hardly any villagemotif that has not served for a postcard.

These postcards were indeed oftenidiosyncratic in their depiction of localthemes, as stated by Geary and Webb(1998, 2). A favorite local theme was

In this collection more than half the cardshave never been mailed. Among the 47%that carry an inscription, less than thehalf comment upon this special motif.Even an asylum card could be used for asimple, everyday message or a sign oflife. An even more special motif, seenwith modern eyes, relates to the Frenchexperience of World War I. I have foundin French postcard collections severaldepictions of crippled persons sitting indog-drawn carts; the person depictedhad had postcards made of themselves(by means of the mail-order system men-tioned above), which they sold to earn aliving. The inscriptions on all these localcards, to the extent that they have beenmailed and not only bought as souve-nirs or collectibles, seldom make men-tion of the pictorial theme.

In contrast to these locally idiosyn-cratic motifs stand the conventionalizedand stereotypical motifs of the touristcards. The tourist industry and earlymass tourism from the late 19th century

monumental buildings,among which churchesand hospitals have aprominent position. Onewould perhaps think thatmotifs like mental asy-lums would be ratherrare on postcards. How-ever, Bogdan andMarshall (1995) have col-lected nearly 1,700 differ-ent postcard depictionsof American mental asy-lums, and they believethese are only a fractionof the postcards pro-duced with such motifs.

Tourists writing postcards in Stockholm, Sweden, 1909.

Photo: Anton Blomberg, Stockholm Stadsmuseum.

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onwards strongly influenced postcardproduction, and the postcard industryfound one of its most profitable outletsin the emerging mass tourism. Typicalmotifs on these cards are landscapeviews, snowy mountains, waterfalls,fjords, glaciers, churches, cathedrals,castles, hotels and passenger ships, aswell as folkloric themes like national cos-tumes, folk dance scenes, peasants har-vesting, etc. Cards could be bought inmost kinds of shops, in libraries, in rest-aurants and railway stations, aboardsteamers, from coachmen and street-cor-ner vendors. Tourists are reported tohave bought, written, and sent cards inlarge numbers, as an integral part of thetravel experience. From reading travelaccounts from the turn of the century, onegets the impression that the cards boughtand sent were as important as the sitesvisited. A British tourist in Germany in1900 reported that, "[y]ou enter the rail-way station, and everybody on the plat-form has a pencil in one hand and a post-card in the other. In the train it is the samething. Your fellow travelers never speak.They have little piles of picture postcardson the seat beside them, and they writemonotonously" (G.R. Sims qtd. inCarline 1972, 64).

We get the same impression fromtravel accounts from Norway, and espe-cially from authors who participated inmass tourism cruises. From a hotel onthe western coast in 1901, a German tour-ist wrote:

When I entered the hall with all theinteresting Nordic wooden carvings,I found the room filled with people,who without exception sat writing.

And what did they write? Picturepostcards!! Oh, scourge of all scourgesin this century. Like a pest you havefallen over us, and you pursue us intothe most desolate valley. No one issafe from you. You are capable ofspoiling the most beautiful voyage,the most picturesque landscape, themost serene fjord, the highest look-out point. . . . And what does the tour-ist do, when your call wakes him upfrom his silent contemplation of na-ture? . . . He digs deep into his pocket,brings out his purse and buys, moreor less grudgingly, 2, 4, 6, 10, or 20postcards, according to the numberof friends and family. Instead of en-joying the marvelous view of thelandscape . . . the tourist sits downand with an unusable pencil scribblessome unreadable lines.

(Laverrenz 1901, 60–61, qtd. inBrudvik 2001)

This tourist's critique of modern timeswas more rhetorical than really felt, how-ever, as he himself admitted having writ-ten and sent fifty-two cards at the laststop in a Norwegian harbor. His excusewas that this was a duty that one shouldnot forget lest one run the risk of turn-ing old friends to lifelong foes. On thisoccasion, he reports, every single passen-ger from the cruiser was standing on theroad in front of the little local post officewriting cards, using house walls, treetrunks, etc., as writing desks. Other tour-ists along the Norwegian coast relate thesame story (Brudvik 2001). Cards couldbe bought on board and in all ports. An-other German, who did a North Capecruise in 1899, reports that the numberof postcards sent from his ship came to

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around 20,000—which meant an averageof fifty cards for each of the four hun-dred passengers on board (Haffter 1900).Other tourists again report that the "float-ing postcard shop" often ran out of cards,just as several of the small, local post of-fices were emptied of stamps. In one case,a small post office in a desolate Norwe-gian fjord ran out of postage stampswhen 6,000 cards were delivered fromone single passenger steamer (Brosi 1906,148). This is "the age of the picture post-card," an English cruise tourist con-cluded, adding that tourists no longerneeded to remember the views andplaces visited—it was sufficient to bringhome the postcards (Klinghammer1903).

The Collectible and the Gift

Dear Stanley, I am sending you thispostcard. I hope you will like to putit in your postcard album. I hope youare well from your loving AuntieNellie Rudgley.

(Message on a tourist card with mo-tif from the western coast of Norway,sent in 1906 to England, on a "di-vided" card with room for longermessages)

"Have you got anything for me,please?" The postman smilinglydiscloses the contents of his sack tothe girls, who beam with joy. "I got17. How about you?" "Oh, only 15 . .." Father grumbles something aboutpostage costs and the poor postmenworking doubly because of thisidiotic collecting craze. But to no avail.. . . Soon after he finds himself eagerly

advising them on how to place thepostcards in the albums.

(Reflections of an anonymousNorwegian girl, "Brevkort ogBackfischer" 1903, 41–44)

The British tourist in Germany in 1900(cited above) noted on his cruise down

Postcard sent in 1900 from The Hague to Paris.As the other side of the card was reserved forstamp and address, any greeting or messagehad to be written on the picture side. Thelonger the message, the more detrimental tothe picture. The inscription (quoted in the text)is about exchange: it confirms the receptionof other cards, promises to send more cards,carrying cancellation marks from the depicted

sites.

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the Rhine that at each stopping-place awaiter was sent ashore with a large con-signment of cards for the post. He wasastonished to learn that they were mostlyaddressed by the passengers to them-selves in order to secure the appropriatepostmark; collectors liked to have theirpostcards carry a cancelled stamp(Carline 1972, 64). In France, collectorscould bring their cards to any post officeand have them cancelled without send-ing them, whereas the British post officerefused this concession, to the dismay ofBritish collectors.

To have the correct cancellation wasa main concern for tourists in Norwayas well. From the ports where the steam-ships called, we have reports of throng-ing at the post offices, long queues, andsweating postmasters applying stampsand cancellations as fast as they could(Brudvik 2001). On their arrival at theNorth Cape, this practice would culmi-nate. In 1897 a Danish tourist reportedthat the two hours passed on the plateauwere spent writing cards. The visitorswere allowed to have them cancelledthere with a postmark stamp reading"Nordkapp," brought along from theship, as there was actually no post officeon the plateau. Then the cards werebrought back to the ship and deliveredto the nearest post office (Andræ 1919,100). On a cruise on the German shipAuguste Victoria in 1899, one of the crew,who served as a "Postmaster," had tocarry 4,000 cards up to the plateau ofNorth Cape to have them cancelled there."The poor man showed me his hand af-terwards," a German tourist reported, "itwas full of blisters from the stamping"(Haffter 1900, 53). A few years later, tour-

ists on the plateau found a postmarkstamp and a stamp pad on a table on theplateau; they were now allowed to do itthemselves for the price of ten cents acard (Lausberg 1912, 348).6

Why this fad for cancellation marks?There were probably two reasons. Onewas to authenticate the object, which wasimportant to the collector, especially tothe male collector focusing on postalitems. The other reason was to authenti-cate the travel experience, i.e., the fact ofhaving been to certain places, which wasof importance to the souvenir gathererand probably also to those tourists whowanted to impress family and friends athome (Belk 1997).

It is obvious that many of the cardswere gifts to collectors or exchange items.If we turn to the inscriptions on the cards,phrases like "Sent with affection to swellyour collection," "Add me to your col-lection," etc., are common. In the follow-ing (exceptionally) long inscription, theexchange aspect appears clearly:

Thank you a thousand times for thecard from . . . and the two fromRobinson that I received recently andgave me much pleasure. Two friendswill be going to Rotterdam andAmsterdam for the Pentecost. I willprofit from their journey by furnish-ing them with cards from thoseplaces, so they will carry cancellationmarks from the towns they represent.I leave on the 9th for Bruxelles, fromwhere I shall not forget you. [. . . greet-ing + signature]

(Postcard with local motif, sent in1900 from The Hague to Paris. Frenchinscription.)

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The two following inscriptions show thatit must have been common for touriststo take on commissions for collectors. Inboth cases the tone is formal and thepolite vous-form is used; the receivers arenot close acquaintances:

Madame, I hope that among the se-ries of cards that I send you I willchance to find something that willbring you pleasure. I start by send-ing this old church in ancient gothicstyle [. . . Formal greeting and signa-ture]

(Postcard with tourist motif, sent fromStavanger, Norway, to Paris in 1903.French inscription.)

Madame, I beg your pardon for mylong delay in answering your latestcards, for which I will express mythanks. I will do my utmost to bemore regular in my correspondencenext time. [. . . greetings + signature]

(Postcard with tourist motif, sent in1903 from Stavanger, Norway, toFrance. French inscription.)

There are many cards with similar in-scriptions. In order to facilitate exchangequite a few postcard exchange clubswere established at regional as well asnational and international levels. AFrench club founded in Nancy in 1900with the special aim of promoting inter-national exchange counted as many as2,400 members in 1904 (Ripert and Frère1983). The members exchanged bothused and unused cards, but the clubsprobably also served as contact centersfor the type of exchange that the above

inscriptions represent. It was also com-mon that collectors sent cards as "gifts"to themselves, as the Rhine tourist wit-nessed (above). A corresponding case,observed by Geary and Webb (1998, 8),was a French colonial civil servant whoduring the years 1900 to 1925 sent post-cards to his parents back home, askingthem to keep the cards for his future col-lection.

The proportion of cards intended pri-marily for collections, as exchange ob-jects, or as gifts to others or to oneself,must have been high. In addition to cardslike those cited above, where the inscrip-tions clearly disclose the collecting con-text, there are all the blank, unused cardswe find in present-day collections. More-over, many cards containing ordinarygreetings were also essentially items ofexchange between collectors. In collec-tions of Golden Age cards that I havestudied, with motifs from Norway (fromone much visited fjord), from France (lo-cal cards from one département) and fromEgypt (motifs from Alexandria), allcollected in the 1980s and 1990s, I havefound that the percentage of unusedcards ranges from above 50 up to 70, withthe highest percentage for tourist cards.Others confirm this result. In the collec-tion of (local) asylum cards referred toabove over half of the approximately1,700 cards were unused (Bogdan andMarshall 1995).

Cards that are bought and kept un-used are more likely to survive than usedcards, so we cannot infer from these casesthat more than half of the cards producedduring the Golden Age were boughtwith the sole intention of keeping, ratherthan sending, them. However, knowing

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the collecting fad of this period, whichdefinitely included mailed cards (includ-ing, for example, those mailed in orderto procure a cancellation), one may askwhich is more amazing: that the percent-age of used cards that have survived isso low, or that the percentage of unusedcards is so high? My conclusion so far isthat the card had an important functionas a gift, whether it was in used and im-perfect form or in unused, mint condi-tion, whether it was a gift to other col-lectors or a gift to oneself. And—as rules

of reciprocity would have it—gifts toother persons entail gifts in return.7

Back Page Becomes Front Page

In order to approach the inscriptions onthe postcards, a brief account of the for-mal postal rules and the design of thepostcard is necessary (Ulvestad 1988,Rogan 1999). The design of the cardplayed a major role for the form and thelength of the message, and consequentlyfor its contents. From the 1870s to the1890s the postcards went through sev-

Local card with a scene from the Main Street in Tromsø, Norway, sent by an English tourist in1905. The card is of the old type; the recto or front side contains only the address of the re-ceiver and the stamp. What we see is the verso or back side, with the picture and a smallmargin for messages—in this case only a signature. A sign of life, perhaps even meant forboasting, maybe also a collectible or an exchange object, but carrying no further informationto the receiver.

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eral phases, from the prepaid, picturelessstationery card, to cards with picturesand postage stamps.8 From the late1890s—the beginning of the GoldenAge—the postcard's front side or recto(as it was called by the postal authori-ties) contained only the address of thereceiver and the postage stamp, and theback side or verso was more or less cov-ered by the picture. Messages were notallowed on the recto side, only on theverso—which they had to share with thepicture. This meant that there was onlyroom for very short messages (plus a sig-nature), in a corner or on the margins,unless you wrote your message acrossthe picture—the only solution for longermessages. This physical frame is impor-tant because it imposed limitations onthe use of the card. The postcard couldnot serve as a medium for substantialmessages, and overwriting the picturewas not a good solution for the aestheteor the collector. Longer messages had tobe sent by ordinary, closed letters.

The final phase started just after theturn of the century—in 1902 in GreatBritain, 1903 in France, 1905 in Norway,1907 in the USA—when the recto or ad-dress side was divided into two parts:one half for the address and the stamp,and the other half for the message, as onmodern postcards. From then on, thepicture was allowed to spread out on thewhole of the verso. The authorities stillstuck to the recto-verso terminology, butfor the ordinary consumer the hierarchybetween the two sides had been inverted;the back side had finally become the frontside, and the address and the messagewere relegated to the back side. This leftmore room for writing, although the

space still allowed only fairly short mes-sages. The picture postcard remained theperfect medium for short communica-tions.

Ritual Communication

Arrivé bon port [+ signature] (Tour-ist card from Egypt to France, 1904)

En ballade [+ signature] (Local cardsent within France, 1908)

Je ne pourrais pas écrire avant 8 jours[no signature] (Tourist card from Nor-way to France, 1905)

The brevity of the inscriptions is strik-ing. We shall have a look at the inscrip-tions of a few collections of cards fromthe Golden Age, all of them new collec-tions gathered in recent years. Of a smallspecial collection of thirty-six old touristcards from Alexandria, only ten had beenthrough the mail. The great majority ofthe mailed ones (eight out of ten) hadextremely short inscriptions, like "Arrivébon port," "Amical souvenir," "Bonnesanté," "Remerciements," "Souvenirlointain," "Amical bonjour," "Salutation,"or a signature only—even if some ofthese cards have a divided back withroom for longer messages. Another smallcollection of tourist cards, from a Nor-wegian fjord, shows the same pattern:out of twenty-one old cards only eighthad been mailed. Six of the eight cardshad very short inscriptions, of the abovetype. Of the four long inscriptions inthese two collections, two contain com-plaints of not having received returncards from the addressees ("Ns sommesétonnés de ne pas avoir de vous

An Entangled Object

15

nouvelles. Pas une seule carte"). That is,the mailed cards are either short signs oflife or metatexts on communication. Ofanother series of forty cards, all sent in1904 by a tourist in Norway and ad-dressed to three different members of hisfamily in Paris, thirty-two contain noth-ing but the signature, seven very shortinscriptions, and one an inscription ofabout twenty words. A possible interpre-tation is that these forty cards are gifts toa collector, either himself or one of thefamily members back in Paris. All thesame, these cards served as signs of lifeas well.

The above sample is small, but oth-ers confirm the result. Geary and Webbhave examined two collections of cardssent from Africa to Europe (consisting,respectively, of thirty-four and thirty-fivecards) and they observe that "[m]ostcards carry no message; three or foursimply state that a longer letter had beendelayed" (1998, 7). A contemporary ob-server, a German tourist in Norway, con-firms these findings. He added the fol-lowing remark to his observation of hisfellow travelers writing cards on everypossible occasion (quoted above): "Don'tworry about writing too much. Yourwords are of no importance. The receiverdoes not want anything but the picture,whether it comes from the north, south,east, or west; it doesn't matter whetherit's a phototype, a collotype, or a lithog-raphy. Most publishers are smart; theyproduce cards where you cannot writemuch more than your name. That's howmuch space there must be left for thecards to be bought . . ." (Laverrenz 1901,61).

Local cards too might have short in-

scriptions (much shorter than the spacedemanded), as indicated by a study ofcards from a French département (l'Ain),even if there is a higher number of longerinscriptions among these. What is strik-ing, however, is the exchange aspect:

My dear Léontine, Thank you verymuch for the short message you sentme. I was pleased to have it. (+ signa-ture)

My very dear little Annie, I hasten toanswer your letter, which I receivedyesterday evening. I was very happyto have news from you. . . . (+ signa-ture)

I received your card, which pleasedme. . . . (+ signature)

Dear Father and Sister. I write you thisshort card to tell you that I have ar-rived well and to say hello to you. (+signature)

There is something automatic and ritu-alistic about most of these inscriptions,whether they carry a signature only (insome cases not more than the initials) ora few words in addition. It is like a hand-shake or a simple phrase—"Good morn-ing," "How do you do," or any other ev-eryday ritual. These inscriptions are al-most void of information but they are stillmessages with a strong expressive value.

Communication theory may shedsome light on the function of these cards.In order to draw a clearer line betweenmass culture and popular culture, folk-loristic theory has pointed to the distinc-tion between messages that carry infor-mation and messages that are primarilyactivities in themselves (Eriksen 1989).

Bjarne Rogan

16

The first communication form is linear,with a sender, a receiver (or a group ofreceivers in the case of mass communi-cation), and a piece of information ofsome sort, the intention being that oneperson or one group informs another per-son or another group. The second typehas been described as circular,encompassing people who have a fairlyclose social relationship; the purpose ofsuch communication acts being to con-firm or mobilize an already existing so-cial relationship; hence the term "activ-ity-oriented" communication for the lat-ter, as opposed to the first type, "infor-mation-oriented" communication.9

It has been pointed out that activity-oriented communication presupposes aclear set of common references and thatthe purpose is often merely to confirmthese (Eriksen 1989). To make the mes-sage short and economical is one way ofdemonstrating this form of cultural com-petence. The aim is not to provide newinformation, but to refer to what is al-ready shared; the most successful com-munication is the one that is least redun-dant. A postcard inscription like "Arrivébon port" ("Arrived safe and sound")presupposes that the addressee knowsthat the sender has left on a journey andprobably also most of the details of theitinerary. The same applies to all thecards with only a greeting—a "Bonjour,"a "Salutations," an "Amical souvenir," etc.— or with nothing but a signature or aset of initials. Their information compo-nent may very often be reduced to thatof a sign of life; they can be translated toa "Hello, I'm alive" and "I haven't forgot-ten you." They include a "Wish you werehere," whether literally expressed or read

between the lines. Inscriptions like thesedo not transmit information external tothe sender; they are more or less identi-cal to the sender.10 They are social tokensmore than informative messages.

Whether the postcard contains a shortinscription, a signature, or a set of ini-tials, the redundancy—normally an im-portant element when information istransferred—is reduced to a minimum.These are cards exchanged betweenpeople who know each other well andfor whom the context is known.11 Nocard is totally void of information; afterall, they state that the sender is or wasalive at the moment of mailing. But themain function is to keep up reciprocalsocial contacts ("reciprocal" communi-cation is perhaps a more accurate termthan "circular" in the case of postcards).In the same way, cards sent between col-lectors, with little or no text, also havethis secondary, social function of keep-ing the network going, as if stating "I'mstill interested in your collecting activityand I'll help you enhance your collec-tion." Marshall McLuhan's oldcatchphrase, "the medium is the mess-age," still seems valid for some types ofcommunication.

Due to its predominantly social aim,the postcard may be viewed as a form ofritual communication. A ritual may beidentified by three characteristics,namely repetition, institutionalization(the act must be familiar andpredictable), and expressivity.12 The lastcharacteristic makes it possible to drawthe line between rituals on the one handand (utilitarian) habits and routines onthe other. From the point of view ofsemiotics, the ritual act—e.g., sending a

An Entangled Object

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Three typical tourist cards from the North Cape, dat-ing from 1905 or earlier. The back sides contain noth-ing but adress and stamp, as prescribed. One card car-ries a signature and a date only. The second is un-signed but has the following inscription: "Anotherfor your collection; one J. V. gave me last night." Theinscription on the third card is "We’re alive. All wellat home. Thanks for the card you sent me" plus sig-nature. This means three signs of life, at least oneexchange object, and one metatext on communication.

Bjarne Rogan

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postcard—may be seen as a signifier ofsome symbolic content: the signified (inour context, a sign of life or aconfirmation of friendship). What makesa routine a ritual is when the expressivevalue (the signified) enters theforeground. The intention of theperformer and the interpretation of theobserver and receiver are the essentialcriteria in distinguishing a ritual from aroutine. The postcard often has highexpressive value. It represents a practicalrealm, that of messages and informationexchange, but its informaa strong valueof sociability: the mobile phone call andespecially its text-messaging capacities(including the recent technology oftransmitting visual or photographicmessages). Its popularity was shown onNew Year's Eve 1999, when—remarkably—the main Norwegian netoperator registered three million textmessages in a total population of fourmillion. Recent research among youngpeople aged between thirteen andtwenty confirms the fundamental roleplayed by text messages for keeping intouch and confirming socialrelationships (Johnsen 2000).

The mobile phone has two character-istics in common with the postcard (andwhich distinguish it from the ordinary,permanent telephone): it is a communi-cation system based on individual accessto the medium (you seldom share a mo-bile with others), and the text-messag-ing system allows communication inde-pendently of time and place (you can senda message from wherever you are at anytime, day or night). The mobile, its textmessaging capacity, and the omnipres-ent availability it offers are described by

young informants as essential for belong-ing to, and maintaining membership in,groups and networks. Just like the post-card message, the mobile text messageis asynchronic (unlike the direct tele-phone conversation), and because spaceis limited, it is minimalist and non-re-dundant. It is used mainly to send shortemotional messages (often coded, in per-sonal variants, as postcard messageswere also often sent in abbreviated form),jokes and gossip, or drawings; conse-quently it has little information value buta high expressive and symbolic value(Johnsen 2000). These rather non-essen-tial messages (from a utilitarian point ofview) require responses within a shorttime-frame, in accordance with the prin-ciple of gift giving and immediate reci-procity—unless you want to punishsomeone by demonstrating his non-be-longing or to mark your own superior-ity. The text message may be said to havethe same relation to a telephone conver-sation as a postcard does to a letter.

An Entangled Object

Around 1900, the Western world experi-enced a craze for postcards, a fad thatlasted two decades and spread to mostof the world. There is a striking contrastbetween quantity and banality, i.e., be-tween the enormous number of post-cards produced and sold during theGolden Age (probably at least 200 or 300billion cards) and the use of them, as wecan infer from the considerable numberof examples that have survived until thepresent. Half of the surviving cards areblank (not mailed) and a substantial pro-portion of the used (mailed) cards—fortopographical motifs probably more

An Entangled Object

19

than the half—carry short, banal greet-ings or only the signature of the sender.

However, these cards served a multi-plicity of uses and functions and theywere enmeshed in a tangle of relation-ships. Aesthetic appreciation of the pic-ture motifs lay behind the postcard'spopularity in general (the symbolic andrepresentational aspects of the imageshave not been treated in this article), andthe aesthetic dimension certainly playeda major role in its widespread use forgreetings, in its function as a souvenir(including the role of the tourist card toauthenticate the journey, and conse-quently as a status claimer), and in itsenormous popularity as a collectible. Fora short period, the picture postcardeclipsed the world's number one collect-ible, the postage stamp. The two latteruses—as a souvenir and as a collectible—are closely entangled, even if some theo-rists have seen them as separate func-tions (Stewart 1993).14 These more or lessenmeshed uses entrained the cards in acomplex exchange and gift economywith reciprocity as a central principle.

But it was not only the imagery, orthe card as a picture carrier, that counted.The card as a physical object had twosides. The exchange and gift economy ofthe card also included the inscriptions.According to classical gift theory, a giftcannot be understood as a property re-lationship to a material object, but mustbe seen as a function of a social relation-ship: a gift is an object that tells us some-thing not about itself, but about the rela-tionship between donor and receiver(Mauss 1923–1924).

Even if communication was the raisond'être of the picture postcards, they sel-

dom carried a substantial, linear mes-sage—i.e., new information—from thesender to the addressee. As a communi-cation medium, the card carried mes-sages more or less void of information;they served mainly as a sign of life and areminder of social relationships. The pic-ture postcard was predominantly a car-rier of what has been termed "activity-oriented" communication, the purposeof which is to confirm, mobilize, orstrengthen social relationships. This formof communication presupposes a set ofcommon references and some sharedknowledge. To confirm this was a mainpurpose of the cards. There was no roomfor redundancy: the shorter the mes-sages, the more convincing the confir-mation. For the cards to function as so-cial glue, the exchange principle wasimmediate reciprocity.

For the first time in history, the pic-ture postcard offered the opportunity ofactivity-oriented communication overlong distances and on journeys, in amuch easier and more efficient way thanthe closed letter. Today, e-mail messagesfulfill the same function, to some extent;and mobile phone text messages to aneven greater extent. The great difference,however, is that these modern electronicmessages do not function as aestheticobjects, or as souvenirs, or as collectibles.What characterized the craze for the pic-ture postcard a century ago and guaran-teed its enormous spread and popular-ity was precisely these enmeshed func-tions, concrete as well as symbolic, andthe many layers of meaning invested inthe postcard. Few material items aremore aptly characterized as "an en-tangled object" than the picture postcard

Bjarne Rogan

20

of the Golden Age. This humble mate-rial artefact was—to paraphrase T.S.Eliot—an emissary of the culture of theturn of the century.

hind in the first years of the century: in 1903/04 the British sent around fifteen cards perinhabitant (600 million cards for about 40million inhabitants), the Swedes ten cardsper inhabitant (48 million cards for ca. 5 mil-lion inhabitants), and the Norwegians lessthan four cards per inhabitant (ca. 9 millioncards for ca. 2,4 million inhabitants). Therough estimate should perhaps be reducedto something between 200 and 300 billioncards.3 The same criticism may be leveled at otherversions of (functional-pragmatic) discourseanalysis of cards, like Jaffe 1999.4 Great Britain had six postcard journalsduring the early years of the century, mostof them of the ephemeral sort, and Francehad sixteen. Similar journals flourished fora short period in many European countries,the USA, and South America. Few, if any,survived the Golden Age.5 The terms "push" and "pull" factors areborrowed from migration studies, wherethey are commonly used to explain thedouble motivation behind the decision toleave one's country in order to settle in an-other.6 An even more "authentic" way of cancel-ling the cards on the North Cape cruises,according to popular rumor, was to let themidnight sun burn a hole in them by meansof a magnifying glass (Lausberg 1912, 348,410).7 To decide whether the unused cards wereprimarily travel souvenirs or primarily col-lectibles, it is necessary to have a look at oldcollections. Old collections are rare, however,as they have often been dispersed by latercollectors.8 The picture postcard, as we know it fromthe beginning of its golden era, had two fore-runners, both of which were collectibles, onefor (male) philatelists and the other for (fe-male) card collectors. The first was the pre-

Notes

1 This article is based on a paper I gave atthe 8th Interdisciplinary Conference on Re-search in Consumption, Paris, July 26–28,2001. Translations of quotations and post-card inscriptions from Norwegian, French,and German are by the author. Thanks toprofessor Reg Byron for language revision.An earlier version of the Paris paper hasappeared in Norwegian (Rogan 2002).2 No one has yet ventured to calculate thetotal number of postcards produced duringthe Golden Age. A rough estimate is possible,however, which departs from Carline's esti-mate of 7 billion cards passing the world'spost offices in 1903. It is generally acknowl-edged that the craze culminated around1912. Available statistics of dispatched cardsfrom the Norwegian post authorities are asfollows: 1879: 166,000 cards; 1900: 3,570,000;1904: 8,831,000; 1905: 12,400,000; 1910:17,040,000; 1920: 15,569,000; 1935: 8,912,000.The yearly average number of mailed cardsbetween 1900 and 1920 is 11,500,000, or al-most twice as high as the figures from 1903.In the international context, this translatesto roughly 14 billion cards a year or morethan 250 billion cards during this twenty-year period. If the proportion of unused/undispatched cards is estimated at 25% ofall cards produced—probably a conservativeestimate—the total number of postcards pro-duced during the Golden Age may havesurpassed 300 billion cards. However, Nor-way may not be the best index for such esti-mates, as the country lagged somewhat be-

An Entangled Object

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paid, pictureless stationery card that wasintroduced around 1870 by postal authori-ties, the other the (seasonal) greeting or con-gratulations card with a picture that had tobe sent in a closed envelope. The stationerywas originally a purely philatelic object. Thesecond phase started when private, picture-less cards (i.e., not issued by postal authori-ties) with postage stamps were allowed bypostal authorities in the 1880s, the thirdphase in the late 1880s when the authoritiesaccepted a small vignette picture in one cor-ner, and the fourth phase when the picturetook over most of the back side of the card(the verso), leaving only a small place for themessage. These transitions and the mergingof the two collectibles into one took place atdifferent times in different countries, but to-wards the end of the 1890s the postcard hadbecome a collectible in its own right, and itwas no longer a branch of philately.9 As pointed out by Eriksen (1989, note 2),this activity-oriented communication formcorresponds closely to one of six functionsthat Roman Jakobson has ascribed to the (lin-ear) communication act, namely its phaticfunction: "The phatic function is to keep thechannels of communication open; it is tomaintain the relationship between addresserand addressee: it is to confirm that commu-nication is taking place."10 It may be added that from the point ofview of performance theory the writing andsending of a card with a personal, handwrit-ten inscription, even a stereotyped inscrip-tion or a signature only, mark the presenceof the sender; the card represents personalpresence and individuality. These theoreti-cal arguments, however interesting, applyrather to contemporary contexts than to theturn of the 20th century, when handwrittenmessages were the rule and printed ones theexception.11 If the context is missing, such messagesmay even function counter to the intention.

Some thirty years ago I received a postcardfrom my father with a minimal inscription(only "Hello, I'm fine"), sent from Hawaii.Living away from home myself, in anotherEuropean country, I had not been in contactwith him during the last month or so, and Igot quite upset by the card. What on earthwas he doing on the other side of the globe?As far as I knew, he had no business there,he could not afford a holiday like that, andit was totally unlike him to make a trip likethat alone. It kept me up one night, wonder-ing if he had gone nuts and left my motherand the rest of the family. From a phone callhome the next day I learned that he had aprofessional mission there. But my lack ofknowledge about the mission (as a hospitaldoctor he was sent to accompany a sick, dis-abled person back to Norway) and the to-tally unexpected card taught me a lessonabout the function of postcards: If you don'tknow the context, a minimalist message doesnot work!12 See among others Rogan 2000 for a dis-cussion of rituals. The stress on expressivityis borrowed from Edmund Leach 1968. Seealso Rothenbuhler 1998.13 See also Rothenbuhler 1998, 22–23, onritual communication as communicationwithout information. His text contains someinteresting points of view, although he doesnot include the important social function thatEriksen (1989) discusses.14 While I appreciate Susan Stewart's (1993)arguments regarding the distinctionbetween the souvenir and the collectible andher discussion of the one as a metonym (orrather a synecdoche) and the other as ametaphor, I disagree with her conclusion. Acollectible always functions as a souvenir,and a souvenir may easily end up as acollectible.

Bjarne Rogan

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Works Cited

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Belk, Russ W. 1997. Been There, DoneThat, Bought the Souvenirs: OfJourneys and Boundary Cross-ing. In Consumer Research: Post-cards From the Edge. Edited byStephen Brown and DarachTurley. London and New York:Routledge: 22–45.

Bogdan, Robert and Ann Marshall. 1995.Views of the Asylum: PicturePostcard Depictions of Institu-tions for People with Mental Dis-orders in the Early 20th Century.Unpublished manuscript, Syra-cuse University.

Brevkort og Backfischer. 1903. Urd[Christiania, Norway] 4:41–44.

Briggs, Asa. 1988. Victorian Things. Lon-don: Penguin Books.

Brosi, Urs. 1906. Eine Fahrt nach Norwegenund Spitzbergen auf demDoppelschrauendampfer "Blücher"der Hamburg-Amerika-Linie 1904.Zürich: Schulthess & Co.

Brudvik, Agnes Ingeborg. 2001. "Com-bining the maximum of comfortwith the minimum of trouble."Reiser med turistskip til Norgekring 1900 i et ritualperspektiv.Master's thesis, Department ofEthnology, University of Oslo.

Carline, Richard. 1972. Pictures in the Post:The Story of the Picture Postcardand its Place in the History of Popu-lar Art. Philadelphia:Deltiologists of America.

Eliot, T.S. 1948. Notes towards the Defini-tion of Culture. London: Faberand Faber.

Eriksen, Anne. 1989. Massekulturensk o m m u n i k a s j o n s f o r m .Budkavlen 68:58–71.

Geary, Christraud M. and Virginia-LeeWebb. 1998. Delivering Views:Distant Cultures in Early Post-cards. Washington and London:Smithsonian Institution Press.

Haffter, Elias. 1900. Briefe aus dem HohenNorden: Eine Fahrt nachSpitzbergen mit dem HAPAG-Dampfer "Auguste Victoria" im Juli1899. Frauenfeld: Verlag von I.Huber.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Packaged Senti-ments: The Social Meaning ofGreeting Cards. Journal of Mate-rial Culture 4(2):115–141.

Johnsen, Truls Erik. 2000. Ring meg! Enstudie av ungdom og mobiltelefoni.Master's thesis, Department ofEthnology, University of Oslo.

Klinghammer, Waldemar. 1903. EineReise nach Norwegen undSpitzbergen auf der "AugusteVictoria." HumoristischeSchilderung aus derK l e i n s t â d e r p e r s p e k t i v e .Rudolstadt: Verlag der Fürstlichpriv. Hochdrückerei.

Lausberg, Karl. 1912. Das Nordland.Leipzig: Klinghardt & Biermann.

Laverrenz, Viktor. [1901]. In das Land derFjorde: Reisebriefe aus Norwegen.Berlin: N.p.

Leach, Edmund. 1968. Ritual. Encyclope-dia of Social Science. New York:Macmillan.

Mauss, Marcel. 1923–24. Essai sur le don.Forme et raison de l'échangedans les sociétés archaïques.Année sociologique, 2nd ser., 1:30–186.

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Ripert, Aline and Claude Frère. 1983. Lacarte postale. Son histoire, safonction sociale. Lyon and Paris:Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

Rogan, Bjarne. 1999. Postkortet. In NorgeAnno 1900. Kulturhistoriske glimtfra et århundreskifte. Edited byBjarne Rogan. Oslo: Pax forlag:224–242.

Rogan, Bjarne. 2000. Travelling—Be-tween Ritual and Routine: Somecomments on a consumptionritual in a historical perspective.In Volkskultur und Moderne.Europäische Ethnologie zurJahrtausendwende. Edited byBernhard Tschofen. Wien:Selbstverlag des Instituts fürEuropäische Ethnologie:179–192.

Rogan, Bjarne. 2001a. Stamps andPostcards—Science or Play?Ethnologia Europaea 31(1):37–54.

Rogan, Bjarne. 2001b. Consuming Pas-sion and Passionate Consump-tion. In An Adventurer in Euro-pean Ethnology. Edited by PirjoKorkiakangas and Elina Kiuru.Jyväskylä: Atena:85–109.

Rogan, Bjarne. 2002. Et inn-viklet objektW:Postkortet som suvenir ogsamleobjekt, gave og rituellkommunikasjon. Tidsskrift forkulturforskning 1(2):39–56.

Rothenbuhler, Eric W. 1998. Ritual Com-munication: From Everyday Con-versation to Mediated Ceremony.London: Sage Publications.

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Stephen BrownUniversity of Ulster, Jordanstown,

Northern Ireland

Dear Bjarne

Greetings from Liguria! I'm sitting in anairy hotel lobby in Italy, looking at a gen-eral store across the street. It has a coupleof racks of postcards—you know, thestand-alone carousel type—and, in thetwo weeks that I've been here, not asingle person has stopped to scrutinizethe selection. You probably think I'mpretty sad, spending my entire vacationstaring at a desolate postcard emporium,but I think it's kind of appropriate, sincepostcards are pretty sad too. Comparedto the glorious heyday of deltiology, socogently described in your article, pic-ture postcards have come to a very sorrypass. Bypassed by email and cellphonetext messages, they coagulate on rustycarousels outside rundown stores in fly-blown holiday resorts. How art themighty fallen.

Actually, the sad fate of thesemomentoes to modernity makes methink of Martin Amis's novel, The Infor-mation, where he expounds on the slowbut inexorable descent of the novel itself.Or its subject matter, rather. First it fo-cused on gods, then demigods, thenkings, then aristocrats, then merchants,then the working classes, then the crimi-nal classes, and then, finally, the grubbi-est group of all, writers themselves.Amis, admittedly, owes this notion toNorthrop Frye—his "theory of modes"in the Anatomy of Criticism, to be pre-cise—nevertheless the degenerative tra-

Responses

jectory our latter-day anatomist de-scribes is strikingly reminiscent of theretrogression of picture postcards. Recentbooks like Martin Parr's Boring Postcards,a "celebration" of the anodyne accom-plishments of the once mighty genre, aresurely the equivalent of Amis's final fa-tal stage, as indeed are scholarly articleson the subject. The surest signifier of abankrupt cultural phenomenon is itsacademization, institutionalization,pantheonization (and the use of unnec-essarily pretentious words to describe it).

Of course, I'm not referring to yourwonderful article, Bjarne! I really enjoyedreading it. It's terrific, arresting, epochal.Whatever. You know, I actually thoughtI was reasonably familiar with the his-tory of deltiology, until I read "An En-tangled Object." I was particularly struckby your references to the gender dividein postcard collecting, if only because myown as yet unpublished research on theconsumption of greeting cards showsthat the gender divide is still there. Verymuch so. Gender equality may obtain inmost walks of life—theoretically, atleast—but not when it comes to buyingand sending greeting cards. Men, in themain, have no time for that kind of thing.They consider it suspiciously unmanly.Women, by contrast, possess a carefullycalibrated conception of who amongtheir circle of acquaintances warrants acard, and the kind of card they're entitledto—hand-crafted, generic multi-pack,etc. (E-cards, incidentally, are totally un-acceptable; sending one is tantamount toinsulting the recipient.)

Okay, then, having scattered a fewpiastres of academic approbation andhaving taken the opportunity to trum-

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pet my own learned endeavors, such asthey are, convention demands that I tem-per my enthusiasm, qualify my com-ments, and generally demonstrate thatI'm better read than you. Well, I'm afraidI can't temper, I won't qualify, and I'mnot better. I like your article just the wayit is.

That said, I'm a little bit surprised youdon't mention how postcard-mania wasjust one among many consumer societycrazes, or fads, at the outset of the twen-tieth century—bicycles, dolls, ragtime etal. Postcards may have been the craziestcraze, I don't know for sure, but it defi-nitely wasn't alone. Indeed, I've just fin-ished reading David Lodge's latest novel,Author, Author, which discusses the"Trilby" fad that erupted in the wake ofGeorge du Maurier's eponymous best-seller, published in 1894. All manner ofTrilby-related merchandise, from hatsand socks to sausages and stage-plays,quickly flooded the market, much to thechagrin of du Maurier, who was at thecenter of the memorabilia maelstrom.His impecunious confidant, HenryJames, wasn't best pleased either. Butthat's another story.

Secondly, you seem a tad surprisedby the brevity of the written messageson the obverse of the cards you've stud-ied. But surely we've known, since atleast George Zipf's 1949 classic HumanBehavior and the Principle of Least Effort,that all sorts of social phenomena, com-munications included, exhibit a "powerlaw" or Pareto-like effect. As Philip Ballexplains in his recent book, Critical Mass,this effect is typified by a large numberof short messages and a small numberof long ones. I suspect this is as true of

emails and cellphone text messages as itis of postcards (the present "postcard" isan exception to the rule, naturally!).

It would have been nice, finally, ifyou'd said a little bit more about thetransgressive side of postcards. It seemsto me that there's always been acarnivalesque aspect to postcards, rightfrom the earliest days and notwithstand-ing their latter-day elevation to the aca-demic firmament. I'm thinking, for ex-ample, of the "tall tale" cards of the late-nineteenth century, which depicted gro-tesquely oversized farm animals andagricultural produce. I'm thinking ofGilroy's bawdy picture postcards, whichwere part and parcel of the English sea-side resort "experience." They still are, tosome extent. I'm thinking also of JacquesDerrida's La Carte Postale, which takes asits point of postmodern departure a bi-zarre postcard that Frère Jacques alleg-edly found in the Bodleian Library, Ox-ford.

In fairness, Bjarne, you do mentionthe "sporting" side of postcards, thequasi-pornographic pictures that did somuch to stimulate men's belated inter-est in collecting activities. I feel, however,that there's much more to be said on thesubject. Postcards are usually bought inand sent from liminal locations, after all,and they unfailingly reflect their locale.Locales, in actual fact, like airy hotel lob-bies in Liguria, Italy . . .

Wish you were here.

Ciao

Stephen Brown

Bjarne Rogan

26

Virginia-Lee WebbThe Metropolitan Museum of Art,

New York, USA

Bjarne Rogan's essay about picture post-cards comes at a time when research onthe subject is approaching a juncture. Asthe author summarizes, initial studieshave been published giving an overviewof the topic. In recent years the interestin picture postcards has moved from thesphere of collectors into an academic fo-rum, emerging from the philatelic realmto produce a great deal of literature, bothhistorical overviews and case studies.The majority of scholars have concen-trated on postcards as commodity andobject—how they were made, collected,purchased, sold, exchanged, and distrib-uted to the different genders and to manyclasses of society. The photographic im-age itself has been a primary inspirationfor much of the research, addressing thesource and authorship of the photo-graph, contexts of its production, and theevolution of phrases and captions. Thisis especially true in case studies of post-cards with images depicting non-west-ern cultures formerly under colonialdomination around the world. Issues todo with subjugation—blatant racism,pornography, violence, and the perpetu-ation of stereotypes—are the unsettlingpart of the discourse. Exchange, collect-ing, and key postal regulations have beenaddressed, some extensively. Therefore,the wide range of the publications aboutpicture postcards referred to by Roganis to be expected.

This research also parallels the in-creased investigation into the creation ofphotographic images, especially those

made by non-indigenous visitors from avariety of professions. Many of thesepostcard is about the image. Regardlessof whether this small piece of paper wasmailed or canceled at a postal facility ornot, our understanding of the phenom-enon is based on the relation of the im-age chosen by the sender for a specificrecipient at a unique point in time. Thetransmission of emotion and information(either personal or emblematic) is ini-tially reflected in the choice of picture orsubject. Often, but not always, the wordsinscribed on the card emphasize, iden-tify, contradict, or compliment the im-age—they refer to the pictorial compo-nent and have implications unique to theparticipants. The language and receptionof the entire object is coded in veryunique ways. It is acknowledged that theevolution of abbreviated inscriptions hasbeen formed by space limitations andregulations of worldwide postal regula-tions, thus creating coded, stock phrases.Still, the verbal minutiae often refer tothe picture.

Investigation into the complex formof communication embodied in picturepostcards increasingly focuses on turn-ing them over and acknowledging themessages written by senders. In this con-text, Rogan is correct in using as the pointof departure for his analysis the premisethat the picture postcard acts as "an em-issary of its culture." The effectiveness ofthe postcard to communicate informa-tion or an idea through the representa-tion of a place in a very specific imageand format is powerful and concise. Theconflation of pictorial formulae and stan-dardized phrases may certainly serve asa vehicle for the transmission of percep-

An Entangled Object

27

tions about a particular culture. Onemight ask whose culture is transmitted—the one represented by the image or thesender? Probably both. It should betaken into account that a standardizedrubric of communication through whichthe sender's position in the exchange isconveyed may have been used. Rogannotes specific phrases on postcards—"Sent with affection," "Add me to yourcollection"—that indicate the relation-ship between the recipient and sender.As an object, the picture postcard is a ve-hicle that both represents and "carries"culture. As an arena of ritual communi-cation it seems that context —onceagain— is everything. The interpretationof the length and type of message writ-ten by a sender on a card must alwaysbe interpreted in the entire context of therelationship between the two parties. Thebrevity or length of a specific messagecan be interpreted in a cyclical way toimply or anticipate a specific response,or, indeed, no response at all. Rogan de-scribes cards with messages called "a signof life" and calls them "social tokens morethan informative messages." One couldalso take the alternative view that thesecards do provide information about thestate of the sender "alive," "well,""happy," and that therefore they are alsoinformative.

However, they do seem to be outsideof the exchange if they do not elicit a re-ply and if the recipient does not send acard back to the transient address, butkeeps (or collects) the card. Alternatively,a deferred exchange may occur when therecipient waits until s/he is traveling andthen reciprocates with a card to which,in turn, an immediate reply is not antici-

pated or expected. Other exchanges areunreciprocated, the addressee nevertraveling and sending a postcard in re-turn. The play involved in these obliga-tory arrangements is not always inher-ent in the messages written on the cards.Rogan discusses the systems of exchangeand reciprocity that postcards operatewithin and which are subject to complexnetworks of status and obligation. We seehow the postcard as commodity had dif-ferent values among its early collectors(canceled or not, inscribed or blank) andRogan notes that it operates within a verydistinct social system of communication.In addition to the theorists Rogan cites,it would be interesting to further unpackthe picture postcard transaction withindiscussions of gifts and commodities.Discussions by Kopytoff, Appadurai,and others that Rogan notes come tomind. Postcards certainly operate withincomplex social, linguistic, and culturalstructures that carry obligations and re-flect the position of the writer, photog-rapher, and recipient. How do the post-cards navigate those systems and changealong the way as they move from onelocation to another? Rogan's interestingarticle reminds us that there are indeedmultiple avenues to investigate relatingto the impact of these small pieces ofpaper that have been sent all over theworld.

Work CitedKopytoff, Igor. 1986. The Cultural Biogra-

phy of Things: Commoditizationas Process. In The Social Life ofThings. Commodities in Cultural Per-spective. Edited by ArjunAppadurai. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.