Welcome to Miscellanea Deltiologia
Essays and articles relating to picture postcards and their history.
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| Woodblock printed Japanese postcard on handmade paper, c.1900s |
Postcards can offer a seemingly endless source of interest to anyone with an enthusiasm for a seemingly endless variety of subjects: history, geography, ethnography, architecture, religion, natural history, language, art and illustrators, transportation, advertising, famous people and entertainment, social history, sports, photography and printing, militaria, cartography, bawdy humour, genealogy, politics, archaeology, postal history and philately, folklore and the beauty of the naked human body, to name but a few. I have always been interested in history, prehistory and geography, as well as most, if not all, of the subjects above. I worked for many years as an archivist, all the while honing my love for old documents and challenging palaeography. The combination of all of these factors inevitably funnelled me into the realms of deltiology.
My aim here is to share some of the more interesting items that I find as I pursue both my hobby and my occupation. For postcards are both to me. I sell postcards in my store on Delcampe, tens of thousands of them, and I collect a few items for myself along the way. I have a collection of postcards of the prehistoric monuments of Western Europe. A website, in progress, for them can be found here and I formerly collected postcards of Cornwall and a website for some of those can be found here. The main aim on this particular website though is to include some articles relating to more general topics such as particular publishers, their archives, errors and oddities, and guides to publishers' logos and monograms, series and initials or other identifiers. The latter primarily as a useful reference tool for my own work, though they should prove to be just as useful to others of my ilk. The site will evolve over time so be sure to check back now and again.
All of the cards here are or will eventually be listed in my store. Images of those which are listed in my store will act as a link to the item page when clicked, though please note that some of them will have already been sold, and moreso as time passes. Where the images are not clickable then the cards have not yet been listed, although a few were sold on eBay a few years since and item pages for those no longer exist. The GD&DL and Wardell archives, however, are not for sale