Deltiology

Abstract: ����� ��� This past winter my husband and I finally finished renovating our home. While we were fixing up our place, so many aspects of our life—intellectual, recreational, and social—were put aside. Then one day I wrestled out another dusty carton that had been relegated to the back of a closet. There it is! My postcard collection! As every researcher knows, putting something aside for a while and then returning to it with fresh eyes can reveal new possibilities. Years ago, when I was aggressively building the collection, it was simply a hobby. I worked in a public library, so it was fun to collect postcards that showed other libraries. Now that I have shifted to an academic job and research is an important aspect of my work, I see my postcards in a different light. It is clear that postcards can be helpful sources for library historians, keeping in mind the medium’s inherent limitations. At the same time, the postcard fad of the early twentieth century serves as a sobering reminder that documentation of library history as well as practitioners’ understanding of that history often have been left to chance.

Abstract: Introduction Over the past five years, the Yale University Divinity School Library has been acquiring a significant collection of postcards that document missionary work in Africa and Asia. The majority of these postcards have been made available by one vendor who has scoured flea markets and used books stores through Europe. The collection of more than 4,000 postcards complements other holdings in the Yale Divinity Library's Day Missions Collection. The Day Missions Collection makes up approximately one third of the Divinity Library's 500,000 volumes, and constitutes the bulk of its manuscript and archival collection. Since its foundation in 1892, the collection's scope has enlarged from a fairly narrow focus on training missionaries to become one of the preeminent collections documenting the thought, history, and practice of world Christianity. More than 1,000 postcards from the Divinity Library's collection have been digitized as part of the Internet Mission Photography Archive (http://www.usc.edu/impa) and the American Theological Library Association Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative (http: //www.atla.com/digitalresources/). The postcard phenomenon The "Postcard Era" was a distinct historical phenomenon occurring in the years between the Spanish-American War and the First World War. Postcard collecting was widespread in Europe by the turn of the century, and the fad had caught on fully in the United States by 1905. At its height, postcard collecting was the subject of considerable satiric commentary, including the following by John Walker Harrington, published in American Magazine in March 1906: Postal carditis and allied collecting manias are working havoc among the inhabitants of the United States. The germs of these maladies, brought to this country in the baggage of tourists and immigrants, escaped quarantine regulations, and were propagated with amazing rapidity.... There is now no hamlet so remote which has not succumbed to the ravages of the microbe postale universalle.... Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain....1 The earliest picture postcards produced in Europe were not legal for mailing purposes but this had changed by the mid-1890s. The Post Card Dealer, a trade journal in the U.S., reported that 1,161,000,000 postcards were sent through the mail in Germany in 1906. Figures for the same year in the United States and Britain were 770,500,000 and 734,500,000 respectively. An explanation for these phenomenal statistics is not hard to devise. Advances in printing technology had made high quality but relatively inexpensive postcards readily available to the public for the first time. Practical aspects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries further set the stage: interest in far off lands surged as improved transportation and communication increasingly facilitated travel to far corners of the earth; the world scene was largely free from wars. As noted in Ian McDonald's work The Boer War in Postcards: The postcards were more than just pictures. They were a leap into the world of wider communication which has been such a feature of our own century. They suddenly made people more aware of the world around them...2 Postcards that offered visual evidence of missionary work overseas were part of a larger trend that catered to the West's fascination with distant lands. In an essay in the book Delivering Views : Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, Christraud Geary notes that In the second half of the nineteenth century physical and cultural anthropology emerged as major academic disciplines that also bolstered expansionist and colonizing efforts. Photography soon became one scientific means to document and survey all aspects of societies that had come under colonial domination..... Postcards helped to perpetuate and encode images of Africa, and they greatly appealed to the Western imagination. …

Abstract: HATEMAIL: ANTI-SEMITISM ON PICTURE POSTCARDS Salo Aizenbereg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. viii + 238 pp.There is something paradoxical in admiring an oversized book with high-quality color illustrations when these images carry the most violent mitic Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards elicits such ambiguous sentiments. Nevertheless, Salo Aizenberg has made excellent choices in selecting and curating hundreds of postcards from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, mostly from Germany, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The layout and quality of the reproductions are outstanding, and match the diversity and the richness of the material. It is unfortunate, however, that such a large sample of picture postcards does not receive deeper analysis, from production to usage to collection. Indeed, the picture postcard was first published in the second half of the nineteenth century; it became immediately popular as a quick and cheap communications means, as a visible platform for caricaturists and other artists, and as worthy ephemera from a collector's perspective. Aizenberg sometimes provides detailed information about a publisher, an artist, or the specific historical context, but his treatment and depth of analysis are uneven. The main problem with this book is that it tries to do too many things, and ends up all over the place, tackling issues superficially. The author provides a lot of historical context that is not always necessary, and takes up space at the detriment of a deeper analysis of postcards as an artistic creation, new media, and political commentary. For example, he invokes Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners to make sweeping statements that are neither convincing nor informative: "I don't believe that it is a coincidence that German anti-Semitic postcards outclassed other nations in the virulence of their hatred. It makes sense based on the acts committed against Jews that were so easily accepted in the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast, American and British anti-Semitic postcards were significantly significantly more benign, usually depicting 'humorous' images of greedy, large-nosed Jews, but not Jews as demonic or Jews being expelled and persecuted" (12). Unfortunately, a more refined analysis would have shown that during the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), an extraordinary number of pro-Dreyfus postcards were designed and published in Germany, as a means to mock the French authorities for their relentlessness against the Jewish captain. Another angle worth pursuing would be to follow a specific artist over the course of a decade or two, and note any change in message, tone, or political affiliation, as was the case with the Frenchman Orens, among others. …

Abstract: Postcards of Nursing: A Worldwide Tribute By Michael Zwerdling (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2004) (360 pages; $65.00, cloth) This is a beautiful book, both as art and as material history, replete with an amazing array of postcards from the considerable collection of Michael Zwerdling, the author of this text.. While the postcards represent the years 1893 to 2002, most come from the early twentieth century, the so-called "Golden Age of postcards" (p xi). These postcards both reflected and promoted the importance of nursing to the public, in varying ways. Additionally, the postcards themselves are a beautiful an form, viewed alone or as a whole. Zwerdling states that the book is "offered as a tribute to all nurses" (p. xi), and as such, it is not a traditional history employing a rigorous methodology. Rather, the book's strongest points are in its visual representation of nursing to the public over time and across cultures. This is nursing as art, including realism and fantasy, photograph and sketch, humor and pathos. The author even includes a guide for how to view the contents of the book as if viewing museum art. The reader can jump between the standalone chapters. As more art book than history, the author does not build on the themes in each chapter, nor does he necessarily rely on the last chapter to inform the next. In fact, the postcards were selected for placement in order to create maximal visual impact, rather than for historical argument. In this, the author's task was not to build a cohesive case about any one theme, but rather to show "truths beyond routine perceptions" (p. xi) regarding nursing. And he does this through the images themselves. There are seven chapters in all, loosely organized around themes and sometimes presented chronologically. There is little text, as the author lets the postcards speak for themselves. Each chapter begins with a short introduction addressing the theme and ends with several pages of notes on the individual postcards. If the reader finds any one postcard particularly compelling, more can be found about it at the end of the chapter. These notes vary in length and content, and may include information related to the postcard's artists, the content or message, or customs regarding postcard production and use. The notes are a treasure for the careful reader and are part of the book's most compelling text. The bibliography and index direct the reader to more information. Chapter One, "Symbols of Care," reviews the major archetypes found in nursing and reflected in the postcards. The usual imagery is included, such as nurse as healer, servant, mother, or guardian. …