“Postcards,” writes today’s guest Lydia Pyne, “have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication,

unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralization of their manufacture as well as the physical material connection they created between sender and recipient. Postcards and their digital descendants continue to be about personal connections…We recreate old social networks—old postcard social lines, if you will—with every post of a digital picture.” In her book Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network, Julie Pyne describes the history of the postcard, and those connections it created between senders and recipients. 

Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian, who has previously written about how phony things teach us about real stuff; a history of seven celebrity human fossils, and what they taught their descendants; and bookshelves.

For Further Investigation

Lydia Pyne's fantastic website

Postcards at the Library of Congress

If you like a podcast about postcards, how about one on shoes?

The importance of the history of everyday life