Vacation Postcards for the Library - Novel Destinations

When you travel do you send postcards back home? Wouldn’t it be fun to get or send a postcard this summer? 

The New Milford Public Library would a love to get a postcard from your vacation.

Beautiful scenery, funny pictures, or even just that card you find in your motel room would be fun to get.  Our summer reading themes are “Novel Destinations” for adults and “One World, Many Stories” for the kids. Almost any postcard would fit right in with our themes. 

With email, texting and twitter so accessible, postcards are almost a forgotten form of communication.  Once upon a time postcards of the shore or mountains, cool works of art, national monuments, or just funny pictures would be the way people shared what a great time they were having on vacation with their families and friends.  

Postcard collecting was a popular hobby in the early years of the last century. Not only did families and friends use postcards for keeping in touch, strangers exchanged them to get new and interesting cards for their collections. Postcards are also rumored to have played a part in many a courtship. What fun!

It is also thought that the very first postcard was a practical joke on the British Postal Service. In 1840 the writer,Theodore Hook, sent a hand painted picture postcard bearing a penny black stamp to himself. Why was it a practical joke? because the picture was a caricature of workers in post office. 

The library wants to collect your postcards and put them on display to show the Novel Destinations are patrons have been to. And yes, we would love a good joke too, so if you find any postcards of libraries or library workers please send those too!