THE POSTCARD FANCY
By EDMUND 'VALE
IDON'T think that the collector of the picture-postcard has ever been taken seriously enough to be given a classical name, although, if he should lift the little-used postage-stamp off the back of his trophy and put it in a book, he will be called a philatelist and allowed the proper status of a collector. That is a flat contradiction of the Euclidian axiom which asserts that the part is not greater than the whole. No, it must be admitted that picture-postcard collecting is still down among the canaries, pigeons, guinea-pigs, and pugilists. It has not risen above the rank of a fancy and its devotee ought not to be described as a collector but a fan.
To be called a fan is a hard impeachment. I shall escape it by pleading that what I really collect is places, and that my assortment of postcards is an adjunct to this collection which includes local guide-books, local biographies, and local press- cuttings. All these provide interesting sidelights on that imaginary figure the Spirit of a Place ; but, from a collector's point of view, for good specimen-value (with all the thrills of specimen variety or uniqueness) it is the picture-postcard file which wins hands down.
It is a file, by the way, and not an album that you need for collecting picture-postcards. The idea that, because you collect stamps in an album, therefore you must amass the larger postal object in an album also, has kept people ignorant of what could be made of a collection.
The analogy of the stamp-collection breaks down at the outset. In a stamp-book it is possible to reserve spaces for every known specimen printed up to the date when the book is purchased. But you cannot do this in a postcard album. Nobody knows how many specimens of any given view exist —that is one of the beautiful mysteries of the fancy. Again, you want to handle your cards and range them com- paratively, not to turn them over.
The making up of sets is, of course, one of the inherent joys in all collecting. With postcards You have the additional subtilty of making up cross-sets. Thus, when you acquire a picture of Plymouth Hoe (showing the rebuilt Eddystone Lighthouse standing high and dry on the promenade) you increase at once your Plymouth set and also your set of light- houses. If the picture was taken, say, in the first decade of the century and shows the women in flap hats and trailing skirts and the men wearing boaters, face-trimmings, and calabash pipes (and looking defiantly John Bullish) it will be an ornament to the costume cross-set. To keep in touch with the cross-sets you need a separate analysis index running to about thirty key subjects.
Keeping the analysis index cards well posted is one of the most intriguing parts of the business and often leads one into new paths of knowledge, if not of thought. Here is a portrait of Charles the First. It is an aspect of him you would not find in the National Gallery nor yet in the old portcullis- chamber in the gatehouse of Carisbrooke Castle, where so many unusual likenesses of the enigmatic king are preserved. It shows Charles crowned, holding sceptre and orb, and wear- ing that " George " which in the end he gave to Bishop Juxon with the mysterious charge " Remember ! " It is an excellent and lifelike portrait, the work of a French or Spanish wood- carver who had been commissioned to execute it on the head of a cask of wine which Mary de Medicis had sent as a present to her daughter the Queen of England. The interesting thing about the portrait is that it is Charles the First from a Continental point of view. That I have it here to muse on and perpend (as Touchstone usefully said) is owing to the fact that it appears on a picture-postcard published by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
I have been over the Newcastle museum, but I somehow missed seeing the cask-head and should have known nothing about it had I not spied this postcard in a small sweet-shop window. But seeing the original once (and probably in a bad light) would never have meant the same thing to me as possessing the card, which I can lift at any moment from letter N in the file, and thereupon enjoy a quiet ten minutes' specula' on as to who the artist was, why his impression of the author of Eikon Basilike was just what it was, and how the deuce the cask-end got to Newcastle, anyhow.
In order not to lose sight of the latent possibilities of that card it has to be cross-indexed in four dimensions— in the pink card index (for persons) under Stuart, in the blue card index (for things) under cooperage, in the yellow card index (for places) under Newcastle, and in the green card analysis under wood-carving. If that seems fussy, I ask you to observe the philatelist counting dots, lines and perforations with a high-powered magnifier.
The hunt for interesting postcards often brings one into touch with local history and local talent that would otherwise escape observation. Incidentally, there are quite a number of sailing ships with fascinating histories that have left no pictorial record behind except as cutting a chance figure in an old-fashioned picture-postcard of a seaport. Here is detective work that may carry you far away to the last lap of a prodigious sea story.
Occasionally, the picture-postcard will take the place of the fairy tale as a fixative for tradition, forming a centre for the same peculiar twists which always appear in the fabric of a fireside story. I have in mind a particular instance. I had broken my journey at Workington in Cumberland and had two hours to spend seeing the place. The town, church and harbour contained nothing of outstanding interest and, as I did not intend to make an attempt to see over the steel- works, I began to think that there would be time to spare, for nothing met the eye except what was commonplace and sordid.
In the window of a small tobacconist-stationer's shop I spied a picture-postcard showing a little hive-shaped building. The photograph was labelled " Billy Bumley's House." Inside the shop I was served by a young girl. " Who," I ventured to ask her, " was Billy Bumley, and why did he live in that peculiar house ? "
" Oh he was a great old smuggler, was Billy," said the girl. Was I interested in old things ? She got out the usual loose-box of postcards. One showed the quayside. Here she indicated a large mooring-ring. " Just below that," she said, " is the beginning of a subterranean passage where Mary Queen of Scots escaped from Workington Hall."
With a full envelope and renewed zeal I went on my way. Happily I fell in with a sailor-man who had also worked in the mines. He quickly enlightened me about Billy Burnley. It was, he said, the old folks' name for a bumble bee. As the house was the shape of a hive this seemed conclusive. The fact that the bumble bee lives in a hole in the ground and not in a hive at all I dismissed as irrelevant, " folk " matters being often in conflict with nature-study. The place was, I imagine, one of those circular prisons built in the early nineteenth century to contain drunken sailors—there is an excellent example to be seen at Barmouth. The subterranean passage turned out to be the exit of the town sewer. • But the introduction (which I owed to Billy Burnley his postcard) was a valuable one, for the man was full of entrancing stories of the sea and the old mines, and he poured out in a rich vernacular one of the most heroic narratives I have ever listened to, about that terrible day when the sea broke through its floor into the galleries of a mine.
In buying specimens it is as well to remember that the true photograph is very much more valuable than a repro- duction, especially a reproduction in half-tone, as you can look into it with a magnifying-glass and observe all kinds of detail. Those who study the collection twenty-five years hence will be particularly thankful for the real photo- graph cards. At that date a good collection of picture- postcards made between the end of the War and the present day will probably have a commercial value that will astonish the philatelist. For, while towns and villages in England are changing so rapidly nobody is making a proper record except the picture-postcard fan.
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