The Rise and Fall of the Postcard . . . by Trevor Ellis
At the risk of becoming boring with technology, I felt that I should fill up the remaining corner of this issue with another computer-generated article. Hopefully the end result will be of interest, even if the means of getting there is not for many people!
On occasion I have bought Picture Postcard Monthly and seen in there themes of postcard history, particularly around the way in which the volume of cards used mushroomed in the early years, and the reasons for the decline that set in quickly afterwards. Not being a social historian, I can't cast any new light on the latter point, but I can provide a graphical illustration of the growth and decline.
Now for the technical part. I have my cards on a programme called Microsoft Excel, which is primarily a spreadsheet programme, rather than a specialist database. This does give some advantages, though in that spreadsheets are very good at handling numbers and dates. I manage to set up a system that counts the posting dates by year and puts the results into a bar chart.
The result shows very clearly the sudden rise of the postcard in a few short years to a peak around 1907, followed by a slower decline to a much lower level, still slowly declining through the 20s and 30s. The result from my local cards is very similar, though the level between the wars seems to be relatively higher. Someday, I really must get around to doing the same kind of thing with the "Old Cards List," which is also on Excel. The problem is that I would need to spend a lot of time wading through and converting all of the dates - probably on several thousand cards, don't expect an article next time!