‘Passion for Postcards’ heading to Spellman Museum Sunday
Deltiologists, unite!
For those unfamiliar with that term (it means postcard collector), there’s a lot to be learned at Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History on Sunday. “Passion for Postcards,” a vintage postcard exhibition and market, opens at the Weston postage museum for one day only, when sellers from around the Northeast will put highlights from their collections up for display and sale.
Kathy Alpert, the event’s organizer and a member of the Ephemera Society of America, is looking forward to hosting a large meetup of fellow hobbyists, something she said is going out of style in the Boston area.
“I’m very excited to turn more people on to postcard collecting because it’s sort of been the driving force in my life,” she said. “I never got married, and my postcards are like my children.”
Alpert started her collection when she was a young girl in the early 1960s, she said. It includes 40,000-50,000 postcards, most of which are from the early 1900s, when they were sold by the USPS for 1 cent. She said that preserving old postcards is important to her as they visually document history at a time when photography wasn’t very advanced. Historical postcards also allow people to connect familiar places to the past.
“It’s fun to see something that you patronize today and the way it looked 100 years ago or more,” she said.
At Sunday’s event, more than 100,000 postcards will be on view and organized by topics, ranging from military to holidays to roadside Americana to fantasy.
Alpert noted it took a long time for postcards to be accepted as a form of historical memorabilia.
“I think postcards have always been devalued because they’re so plentiful,” she said. “There were literally billions of them exchanged in the first decade of the 20th century. You have to comb through them to find the treasures.”
Aside from the opportunity to find rare collectibles, Alpert is excited to bring likeminded people together in one common space.
“When you go to a show like this and you’re talking to people about things that they’re interested in, all of your differences kind of melt away,” she said.