My fan collection

My collection of fans is something that happened quite by accident - in fact until I gathered them together for these photos I had no idea I had quite so many! But I suppose that 4 trips to Asia, where they are a natural thing to buy as a souvenir, and the others that have been picked up along the way, all add up! Since they were spread around the house, either as decor or in places they might be useful, I didn't realise how many I had.

And this is not the whole collection, because I have at least one in my drawer at work! It's a purple Spanish one that I bought for practical reasons at the local charity shop on a very hot day!

My most recent fan purchase, from Vietnam, is another one that was bought because it was a very hot day!

Free fan from a play at the Edinburgh Fringe by a Japanese group, and a secondhand woven fan.

 

The other side of the free Japanese fan

Found this fan when clearing my Gran Reid's house. The paper on it was completely falling apart so I replaced it with this wrapping paper.

This was bought from a craft centre in Kyoto on my first trip to Japan.

A brush-painted fan I bought in China

 I think I bought this at a museum of traditional crafts on my second visit to Kyoto

I love this old fan that I found in a charity shop. It looks like someone has been practicing their signature on the back, or maybe repeatedly writing the name of the person they love, but I can't make out the writing very well. My best guess is J Currie.

Folded paper fan from a dollshouse magazine

Blank fans for future craft projects!

Eco warrior

I didn’t plan to buy any accessories in September, because I was participating in Secondhand September, but when I got two-thirds of the way through the month, I decided to reward myself with this Eco Warrior pin from Small Stories Scotland, because I’d been good at avoiding buying clothes and had been doing lots of other environmentally friendly things over the month. 

I also bought Greta Thunberg’s book and read it in an afternoon. I hope that politicians will read it and help to drive the changes we need to make in our society.

Displaying postcards

Washing line

A washing line type display is a great way to show off your postcards. It's really easy to do, by stringing some cord between a couple of nails, and using little decorative pegs.

Wooden block

A wooden block with a slot cut in it is a really easy way to display a postcard on your desk. It's great for motivational postcards!

Pinboard

A pinboard is a fun way to display postcards, but if you want to keep the postcards don't stick pins through them! You can pin little clips to the pinboard to hold the postcards, or arrange pins around the outside of the postcards to hold them.

Washi tape

Washi tape is a quick and easy way of creating an inspiration wall. But be careful with postcards if they are old or delicate, or have a matte surface, as the adhesive could damage them.

Clips
Little clips hung on nails are a good addition to a gallery wall, and you can change the postcards easily.

Blu tak

This was the standard thing to use to display postcards when I was a student. But, like with washi tape, take care. The oils from these sticky taks can leach into the paper, leaving a mark. So it's probably best for just a short-term display.

Fridge magnets

Sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best! Fridge magnets have been the standard way to display postcards for many decades! This works best if you have a tall fridge so that the postcards will be displayed near eye level.



Frames
It's easy to find frames the right size to hold postcards, so this is a quick and easy way of creating a gallery wall.

Letter rack
A letter rack is a nice way to store the postcards you've just received, along with other things like business cards and bookmarks.

Storing and organising postcards

When I started becoming interested in collecting postcards again, I knew I needed to get them organised, and the collection had outgrown the boxes it was in. This was a good excuse to get my DVD collection organised first, and repurpose some of the DVD boxes which were a perfect size for all but the biggest postcards.

I separated the postcards into two boxes, one for places and the other for everything else. I then set about making some dividers from white card. It turned out that I needed a lot more of these dividers than I'd thought, so that I could categorise the postcards properly.

In the "places" box, I sorted the postcards into maps, Fife, Edinburgh, Lochmaben (where we used to go on holiday), the rest of Scotland, England, Wales, Italy, the rest of Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world.

In the other box, there are too many categories to list, but they include famous artists, cats, poetry, degree shows, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, film & TV, and much more! It's really difficult to decide where some postcards should go that fit more than one category!

The boxes are not full yet, so there's room to expand my collection, and I can use more of the DVD boxes when these ones do fill up.

I do still keep my Royal Mail stamp postcards in a separate box. For many years I would go down to the post office on the day these were released, and buy them. But I got rid of a lot of them eventually and just kept my favourites. Now I just buy them if I particularly like the stamps.

Buying postcards

Since I've started collecting postcards again, I've been looking at where I can buy them. It's a lot more difficult to find a good variety of new postcards. When I was young there would be postcards in most newsagents and post offices, and there was a lot of choice. Here are some of the places I've found that you can still buy postcards.

New:

Tourist attractions e.g. National Trust properties

Art galleries

Museums

Tourist information offices (the selection can be quite limited and generic, though)

Good bookshops

Quirky little gift shops

Directly from artists, whether at craft fairs or online

Secondhand:

Charity shops (Oxfam bookshops in particular tend to have a box full)

Antique or vintage shops

Flea markets

Ebay

Etsy

Postcard books

I recently discovered an amazing secondhand bookshop in Burntisland. I'd seen the sign a few times for a bookshop, but this was the first time I'd gone for a look. I was actually looking for postcards, but instead I came out with a book of Boring Postcards compiled by the photographer Martin Parr (who I just happened to see on a programme about British photography I watched shortly afterwards). This style of postcards really appeals to me, and my parents found the book fascinating too.

I've had A History of Postcards by Martin Willoughby since it came out in the 1990s. It's interesting to read about the history of how postcards developed, but most of the book concentrates on eras before the time I'm interested in, with only two pages on the 1960s and 1970s. It seems to jump from the 1930s to the 1980s with not much in between.

Boring postcards are interesting!

Some of my favourite postcards are those that could be described as "boring" but I think they're really interesting because they show an almost utopian view of mundane things like motorways, hotels, and shopping centres, with everything looking new and clean, and all the clothing and cars being lovely bright colours. It's like they are a celebration of the architecture that was modern then but can look dated now.

I suppose I should have realised that this was actually a fake view of the world! I knew there must have been some sort of filter applied to make the colours so intense, but it wasn't until I watched a programme about the history of British photography that I discovered that the colours of individual outfits and cars were painstakingly altered, making some of them more intense but completely changing the colours of others e.g. from white to red.

These days I find that most photographic tourist postcards are just a bit too slick and polished, and I feel they are tacky in their non-tackiness! So I've gone back to my roots and started picking up secondhand postcards from the 70s and 80s with their hyper-saturated colours.

Recently thrifted - Postcards

I've got back into collecting postcards in a big way over the past month or two, and a lot of the ones I've bought have been secondhand, whether from antique shops, charity shops, flea markets, Ebay, or Etsy.

Collecting postcards was one of my main hobbies when I was a child, and I used to get handfuls of them whenever I visited my grandparents, because they would get their friends to save them for me. I would also buy them wherever I went on holiday or day trips. 

Although I'd still been buying a few everywhere I went over the years, I hadn't been keeping an organised collection like I did when I was young. I remember I used to spend the occasional Sunday afternoon organising my collection, and I'm getting back into doing that.

I think one of the things that got me back into postcards was listening to the Postcards from the Past podcast. I'd been following the Twitter account for ages but when I heard the enthusiasm of the guests on the podcast for their postcards I got interested again.

My favourite postcard of all time is one with a weather-house on it by a Scottish artist called Nora Paterson which I bought in a bookshop in the 1980s. I remember looking at her various designs on the display stand and choosing that one. And now I've been able to pick up some of her other designs online!