Postcard

以前去旅行都鍾意買紀念品. 但係香港屋企實在太細,開始冇位擺紀念品. 所以我依家只係買postcard同郵票.講開postcard, 原來postcard係奧地利人發明架.以下嘅資料等我同大家分享吓.

The postcard and ist plain predecessor, the correspondence card, are Austrian inventions!

In 1869 Emanuel Hermann, professor for national economy, came up with the idea of installing a correspondence card with pre-printed stamp.  That’s how broad levels of the population were offered the opportunity for written communication, because the card was cheap to produce and one could save the envelope.  Letters were quite expensive then; the costs for a common letter amounted to 4 “Kreutzer”, whereas the correspondence card was only half as expensive.  However, the correspondence card was restricted to a maxium of 20 words.  The postal direction of the Austro-Hugarian Monarchy was most enthusiastic about the professor’s idea – who, by the way, was also an expert in fashion trends – and it became a smashing success.  And on Ocotober 1, 1869 people who had never before mailed a letter in their life turned into eager writers.  The whole monarchy surrendered to the thrill of communication – a unique incidence in world history!

In the same year the first true postcard was sent from Austria to the world.  A resourceful photographer took advantage of the new communication medium by having some of the corresponding cards imprinted.  As a motif he chose a picture of Melk Abbey.  To this day, the abbey is a venue of picturesque beauty attracting thousands of visitors every year.  That’s how a specifically Austrian medium, without which a vacation can hardly be imagined today, started its triumphant success.

Why does the postcard have this format at all? Most of the Austrian picutre postcards from the time up to approximately 1930 have the format 9 x 14 centimetres.  Only afterwards the modern DIN A6 format prevailed.

One wonders though whether this format – consciously or unconsciously – is based on aesthetic considerations, such as we know them from landscape and veduta painters.  If one diminishes the height and width of the old format by only one centimetre, a golden rectangle of 8 x 13 centimetres comes about which offers a comfortable visual field, whose width-to-height ratio conforms exactly to the golden section.  It would have been too neat a reason.  However, the format simply derived from the prosaic instruction in postmen’s transportation regulations stipulating that correspondence cards and picture postcards were not permitted a bigger size than envelopes – which postmen also had to carry – because otherwise they would improperly protrde from the postman’s batch of letters and thus be prone to damage.

By the way: The postcard that took longest ever to arrive at its address was sent from Austria.  Mailed froma mailbox in the Zillertal valley in 1971 and addressed to a woman in Germany, the card took 37 years to arrive.  Most likely the postcard got lost in Kafka’s forest, continuing on the wrong track until decades later it was finally delivered to the descendants of the addressee, who had passed away in the meantime.
(written by Alred Stohl for Austrian National Tourist Office)