The card anyone could read
In 1865 a Prussian postal official proposed a card that would travel with no envelope. The post office said no.
Heinrich von Stephan called it a Postblatt, an open sheet for a short message, cheaper than a letter and quicker for the post to handle. The Prussian Postmaster General refused it, citing the “indecent form” of an open message, and the revenue a cheaper card would take from the letter. An open card could be read by the postman who carried it, and by whoever was in the house when it arrived.
On 26 January 1869 a professor of economics named Emanuel Herrmann set out a similar idea in the Neue Freie Presse. His card would carry no more than twenty words, counting the address and the signature, and it would cost two kreuzer. A letter cost five kreuzer. Austria-Hungary took the proposal and dropped the word limit. On 1 October 1869 it issued the Correspondenzkarte, with the address on one side and the message on the other. 1.4 million were sold in the first month. Britain issued its own card in October 1870, prepaid at a halfpenny, half the price of a letter. About 75 million were sent in Britain in 1871. By the end of Edward VII’s reign, in 1910, the figure was more than 800 million a year.
The openness never went away, and people wrote on the cards anyway. From 1894 a picture could cover one side, so the words had to fit in the margin beside it. In 1902 Britain divided the back, with the address on the right and the message on the left, which is still how a seaside card is printed. Because there was no envelope, a fashion grew up for saying the private part with the stamp. Tilted one way, it was said to mean “I love you”. Tilted another, “Have you forgotten me?” What was written could be read by anyone. The stamp carried the rest.
The Postal Museum in London keeps the cards Harry Daniels made for Olive Durst while they were courting. They lived a fifteen-minute walk apart, and he sent them all the same. On one he wrote: “I hope you won’t think this one is a rather big advertisement of yourself to send so publicly! I haven’t an envelope at hand that will fit or I would have sent it under cover.” He knew who else would see it. He posted it anyway. They married in 1914. He was killed in 1917, during the First World War. What is left of those ordinary days is the cards.
In the same war the British Army issued a field service postcard on which a soldier was not meant to write a message of his own. He crossed out the printed lines that did not apply, and left the rest. One of them read “I am quite well.” The card carried a warning: “If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.” A name, a date, and the lines left standing were the whole letter.
A card still works for the same reason. There is no room for the opening a letter seems to require, and no envelope to make it private. Someone on holiday buys one because the picture shows the place, and the blank half asks for a line. At home it stands on a shelf. A text is read, and then it is gone. The card stays where someone can see it.
The officials who called an open card indecent were right about what it was. Anyone could read it. People sent them by the hundred million anyway. Some things are worth saying where a stranger might see them.