Nonfiction

I’m Basic: Collecting Souvenir Postcards

There’s a reason it’s a cliché: postcards make good souvenirs

When I was a senior in high school, my French class had the opportunity to go on a March break trip to London and Paris. I saved up all my babysitting money to afford to go on the trip, which would not only be my first time in Europe, but my first-ever “tourist” experience.

For my birthday, just a few days before I left Canada, I got a purple digital camera. This was 2012, so despite taking lower-resolution photos than your average phone today, it was state-of-the-art at the time. My Blackberry phone could take grainy selfies, but this thing — whew, it took like, real pictures. And I was so excited to use it.

You see, I don’t have a very good memory. I have something known as aphantasia — I don’t think in pictures. My memories aren’t stored visually. So in order to remember what things look like, I need photographs.

I became an avid photographer on my six-day trip. I must have taken upwards of 3,000 photos. I lived that entire trip through the camera lens because I didn’t want to forget a single moment of it — and I was becoming quite the amateur photographer, too.

I even made a point of posing my “pocket panda” (a small stuffed animal I carried everywhere) named Lucky in every location we visited. It was going to be my Instagram-worthy souvenir from this trip: “Lucky in Paris.” I took pictures of Lucky in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, with the Mona Lisa, in cute Parisian cafés, on the Pont Neuf — everywhere.

And then I was pickpocketed.

On the very last day of the trip, my camera was in my coat pocket as thirty teenagers checked out of our last hotel at 3 AM and were rushed to the airport for an early flight by bedraggled chaperones. The contents of my left pocket were taken, including Lucky, a set of headphones, my left glove, and, most devastatingly, my camera.

All those photos, gone. (I think it happened on the Metro.)

I was inconsolable the whole way home. It really ruined the trip for me.

How was I going to remember my travels, without photos? My camera had been used not only for all our group selfies, but most of the photos of the trip.

All that could be recovered was one group shot with the Eiffel Tower in the distant background from one teacher’s camera, and an iPhone photo of me sipping a hot chocolate in a café, taken by my friend. No other photos of me in Paris would exist until I returned to the city years later while on a semester abroad to Grenoble.

My hopes of making a photo essay from the point of view of my beloved pocket panda dashed, I eventually recovered by zeroing in on the one “proof” I had left of my trip: postcards.

I bought a few postcards while I was in Paris, as the excitable first-time traveler is wont to do. I had my plane ticket, my receipt from the Louvre, a paper coaster, a handful of metro tickets. So I bought myself a scrapbook with adhesive pages and set about arranging these mementos into a story.

Despite having gone on many more trips in the last decade, including about a dozen European countries (I currently live in Denmark!), I still use that scrapbook. I had to get a second one when the first ran out of space. But it contains almost no photos.

I use a page or two for every trip I go on and add a postcard (or several) and whatever “paper junk” I find in my pockets when I come home. There are ticket stubs, receipts, clippings from brochures and maps, coasters, menus, and other bits that would be meaningless to anybody else.

(But mostly postcards.)

I recently came across Scott-Ryan’s article about collecting bottle caps, a piece of memorabilia often considered “trash,” and it reminded me of my own magpie-like habit of collecting things while traveling specifically to stick in my scrapbook.

Scott-Ryan asks the question: What travel souvenirs don’t come in cheap plastic? and urges us all to think about our environmental impact as a traveler. I, like Scott-Ryan, would rather collect trash rather than create more trash.

My hobby is also super cost-effective. It would cost more if I actually posted them, but I don’t — I just take them home and put them in my book.

In most places, a postcard costs less than a dollar. For really a fancy one, you might pay two or three euros, tops. I’ve gotten some weird postcards on my travels, including one made of cork. Some are bigger than others, and take up a whole page. Some are square or another shape. Each one is unique — even the really stereotypical ones of a city skyline.

My scrapbook of postcards and “travel-trash” tells a story, but only I can read it. I can point to any postcard in it and remember where I was when I bought it — who was I traveling with? Where did we go? What did we see?

Funny anecdotes are “jogged” by these physical reminders of the places I’ve been. I love nothing better than to sit down after every trip and arrange my new pieces, and then start from the very first page and flip through it, remembering stories as I go through the book alone — or with someone else, hearing my travel stories for the first or fifth time.

For Erie Astin, magnets tell her travel stories. She was on her first trip to Europe when she got her first magnet as a cheap souvenir. Since then, she’s added magnets from all kinds of cool locations, each of which tells a story, just like my postcards:

Some people buy expensive souvenirs to commemorate the places they travel, but for most of us, we’re limited in what we can take home.

I still take a lot of photos, although we have the Cloud now, so even if I lose or break my phone, I won’t have a repeat of Paris. But I also make sure to buy a postcard, preferably with the name of a city on it.

It’s the most basic of souvenir collections — even more basic, I’d say, than Erie’s magnets. It’s so basic, there’s even a name for it: “Deltiology” is the official term for collecting postcards. According to some sources I Googled to prepare for this article, postcards are the third most common collecting hobby, after stamps and coins.

I stumbled into postcard-collecting because photography didn’t work out. The aforementioned tragedy really took the wind out of my sails when it came to taking pictures, although I’ve recently been itching to get a “real” camera and try my hand at it again.

The great thing about collecting postcards is that you’re always going to be able to get one. Even if you’re in a non-touristy location, there will be places to get a postcard. Visit any museum, zoo, theme park, airport, train station, post office, or travel agent in any city and they probably have a postcard. Some cities and small towns are less likely to have a city-based postcard, but at the very least, you’ll be able to find one with the country’s name on it, I guarantee.

A lot of my postcards are from specific experiences I had, such as museums or zoos I went to. I try to get one that has the name of the place on the front, but some will be more cryptic to the casual observer of my scrapbook.

“Where did you get this one, with the kitten in a teacup?”

Well, that one’s from London! On that disastrous March break trip, we went to London before Paris. Across from our hotel there was the adorable tea shop where my best friend Emmaleen and I got tea the first morning, before the chaperones were awake. It was run by this very proper British lady and had decorative plates on the walls. The wallpaper was this hideous rose pattern, and there was a cat that slept in the window. We weren’t supposed to leave the hotel alone and got in huge trouble, but I bought this postcard because it reminded me of the shop.

“What about this one, of the sheep photoshopped into a stout glass?”

I picked that up in Glendalough when my sister and her partner came to visit me in Dublin. Rhys and I moved to Ireland in 2018, when I started my PhD at Trinity College. It was our first apartment together, and we’d only been gone for three months when Dana and Roman showed up completely unexpectedly in late October. We took a hike in the Wicklow Mountains, and I had an asthma attack halfway up. The others climbed to the top and left me to recover, but I felt fine after a few minutes and followed them up more slowly. I had this stunning view of the valley, all by myself in the stillness — it was beautiful. I met everyone at the top just in time to hike back down, and picked up this postcard on our way out of town.

“This one is just a wheelbarrow of flowers?”

That one’s from my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario — the Garden City. I found that postcard in a second-hand shop. Dana had come down from Toronto to visit and I knew I had to have it when I saw it in the window. It reminded me of a photo of my Grandma Mary — she had her picture in the newspaper one year, long before I was born, and framed the clipping. The paper had run this lovely story about how big her flower garden had gotten one summer…

Every now and then, I wonder if I should go back through my scrapbook and add photos to the pages, between the postcards and the “trash.” I could print little Polaroid-esque photos from each of the places and work them into the design.

But then I look through my postcards, and I realize, I don’t need photos.

I already have a book of stories.

This story is based on the Globetrotters Monthly Theme, “Souvenirs.”

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