This work tells the story of the 20th century using images and messages from 2000 picture postcards. The postcards depict the day-to-day life of people and what mattered to them, pleased them, shocked or amused them via the cards they chose to send. Year-by-year the book presents everyone from the high and mighty to the low and the worthy talking about the characters, events and hot spots of the century. Saucy seaside jokes, the disasters of the war, the hazards of travel, the caprices of life in work and leisure - all are pictured and discussed. Each year begins with postcard views of the New York skyline and of Piccadily Circus. Though centred on Britain and the USA, cards come from every corner of the world, from Los Angeles to Beijing, from Antarctica to Alaska. Themes which evolved with the century emerge including: transportation (aviation takes us from the Wright Brothers to the moon); cinema; the role of women; fashion; and holidays. Each postcard is accompanied by a caption which places its message in context.
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Postcards, ubiquitous throughout the twentieth century, depict everything from bathing beauties to battleships, tourist attractions to smutty cartoons, giant vegetables to skylines, while keeping pace with changing aesthetics, social mores, and technologies. Artist and avid collector Phillips sees postcards as invaluable windows onto the attitudes and tastes of their times by virtue of both their images and written messages, and he describes this remarkable and thoroughly captivating assemblage of primarily British and American postcards as a "composite illustrated diary in which nearly 2000 people have made their entries." Phillips' introductory history of the postcard is both entertaining and enlightening, and readers will spend hours absorbing the wealth of information embedded in this fascinating and piquant tour of a century. Each sharply reproduced example of the sublime or the tacky, the mundane or the striking, preserves an impulse to capture a moment and make a connection, and charts the evolution of fashion, humor, feminism, transportation, architecture, and the face of romance and war. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Featuring every imaginable image . . . this collection of postcards includes fascinating transcripts of the personal messages written on each dispatch. -- Entertainment Weekly, 8 December 2000
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
2000 views of the world.,
This review is from: The Postcard Century (Paperback)
This is one of those books that pops up and you wonder why no one had thought of it before. Just flick through it and be amazed at what was issued on the front of a postcard. It could be said, in the broadest sense, that these images do reflect the history of the last century.
With excellent printing and mostly six cards to the page, author Phillips includes a few words about each picture and then he comes up with a neat idea: include the written messages from the sender. So as well as some striking images you get the feelings and observations of 2000 people. How many books could be opened at any page and the contents immediately grab your interest? This is one of those books. Strangely, the Amazon sample pages don't show any of the year by year pages which make up ninety five percent of this book.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Big and heavy history of the post card,
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This review is from: The Postcard Century (Paperback)
100 years of postcards (although they are older than that).Thousands of postcard images help illuminate the history of the postcard over the past hundred years. The book is broken out into decades to make the history a little easier. This is an excellent resource book for postcard fans and collectors. All aspects of postcards seem to be covered. One of the best such books in my collection (and certainly the biggest).
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who thought postcards could be so fascinating?,
By
This review is from: The Postcard Century (Paperback)
This is my third pass through this lengthy and thoroughly engaging book. While I'm not a normal fan of postcards, reading this book makes me want to rush out to the nearest flea market and see what I can find.
The best aspect of this book is that the author presents each postcard in terms of the publishing history, the story on the card, and the general scene on the card. The wonderfuly dry, British humor really makes me laugh out loud at time. His commentary on the postcards meant to woo a significant other are quite amusing. This book will truly engage you in ways you would never imagine. It also is a great way to learn odd facts from history that have largely passed from our collective memories. These postcards bring them back for our consideration. This is a fabulous book that you will find hard to put back down.
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