A postcard arriving is always a happy occasion. Maybe someone has been on a trip and sent it to you or maybe a familymember living far off has sent it to you. Wherever its from it is always nice to hang it on your refrigerator door and look at it whenever you pass.

 

During the first few decades of the 1900s there were lots of postcards sent all over Europe, for exampel 43 million postcards were sent between the years of 1904 and 1905 in Sweden alone. Postcards have existed for most of the 1800s but only at the Worlds fair in 1897 did the lines to write the address on start to be used.

 

The first postcards could only have the address written on the back, which led to people writing there messages on the pictures. The cards with divided backs to leave room for a message on the left and the address on the right were invented in Great Britain in 1902, but it took quite a long time to reach the Nordic countries, for exampel the first card with a divided back in Sweden was made in 1905.

 

Sending postcards is something that has been done for the entirety of the 20th century. The arrival of the internet and cellphones at the end of the 1990s led to a decline in the sending of postcards. Today most postcards are either sent from trips or as Christmas cards.

 

Lauri's postcard collection has cards from the last decade of the 19th century up until the 1990s. Most of the cards are collected from around Lieto but there are also cards sent to people elsewhere.