I’ve been a Postcrossing member for a little under four years now, and recently received my 750th postcard! I still love using the service, and every card received is a little treasure in my PO Box. It’s been about a year since I passed 500, so here’s an update about the recent arrivals.
That’s my top 10 countries, sorted by received cards. As usual Germany dominates the service, and collectively German users have now sent over 10 million cards! Russia on the other hand will probably eventually lose the second spot, since cards from there have all but ceased this year due to the war.
These are the countries from which I’ve only received a single card. Can you point to all of them on a map? There’s a longer list of countries from which I have not received any cards, and it’s always a nice surprise when I get the first one from a ‘new’ country.
Card images are anything you can imagine but I’ve been getting a larger percentage of animal cards recently. I suspect the reason may be that ‘tourist’ cards are becoming rarer so people are buying generic cards online. The above are three of the better animal cards received, but by far the weirdest (even perhaps disturbingly so) animal card I’ve got this past year is this one:
Is that a real life Mr Snuffleupagus?
The above are some ‘Postcrossing meetup’ cards I’ve received this year. These are cards printed by Postcrossing users and shared at gatherings. These seem popular in Asia, and the above are from China, Taiwan and Singapore. Very often multiple people sign the back of each, and you can see the back of one of them below.
This is a card featuring the art of ‘Tom of Finland’, a famous Finnish artist known for his gay art. As you can see the sender also used a stamp of the artist that was issued several years ago. Cards where the stamps match the front are very rare and always appreciated.
The stamps continue to impress, and the above is only a small selection of the hundreds I’ve received this past year. Russian stamps seem to be getting bigger every day, and Chinese and Japanese ones more colorful. Some stamps were particularly notable…
The Finnish stamp at top left is not just circular but also die-cut so that the country is removed! The top right stamp is the new German Postcrossing stamp released only a few weeks ago. The bottom left shows a lenticular Olympic stamp from The Netherlands and the bottom right is a selection of several vintage stamps a Japanese user sent me. I was so impressed with her doing this I sent a response card – my first one ever – blanketed with vintage American stamps. She was suitably pleased 🙂
This was probably the most unusual stamp: a braille stamp from Hong Kong! The dots (which read ‘good morning’) seem to be plastic adhered onto the stamp.
The above shows the backs of two cards. People write all sorts of things, from interesting to mundane, but occasionally go to impressive levels decorating or making the back unique. The one on the right is one of the meetup cards, and I’m impressed by the rubber stamps some users have!
From the 250 new cards since the last update, what were my favorites? It was a hard decision, but these three bubbled to the top:
The left one was from Japan and the sender said she bought it in a ‘big bookstore in Tokyo’. If I find this same card for sale, I’d buy it too! The middle card is a vintage card from France that is embossed and has glitter on it. And the right card is just a lovely photo of a man and a baby. There’s nothing on the back explaining the photo (not even artist credit) so we can only imagine who they are.
These days I can send/receive 25 cards at a time, and am averaging about that amount per month. So it may take a little under a year to get to the big 1000 cards received. When I do, I’ll post another update 🙂