Slightly obsessive Cartographic Deltiologist - in other words, I collect postcards with maps on them!

I started collecting map postcards on a school trip to St Mary’s Bay in Kent back in 1967, just before my 12th birthday. My first cards were from the Salmon series drawn by Marion Peck. Over the years, I collected cards whenever and wherever I saw them and gradually friends and family started sending them to me from all over the world. Family camping holidays in France and Germany also produced many cards during the late 60s and early 70s.

On becoming a Geography teacher in a sixth form college in 1982, some of my A level students would send them to me as well, but being busy at work and having a family slowed down my own collecting.

Only when I retired in 2015 did I start to look back at all my cards and realise that they gave me enormous pleasure, so I decided to catalogue my cards and see what was missing. I started to hunt on eBay and went to my first postcard fair in Woking, Surrey. I also discovered the power of the internet in searching for new cards and the history of different publishers. One day, maybe I’ll write a book!

I’ve now got to the point where I am actively searching for just a few cards in each of my older U.K. collections such as Dennis and Salmon as well as collecting new cards whenever I see them. Sometimes this involves buying a job lot of cards in the hope that I will fill some gaps in my increasing collection. This Flickr site shows the duplicate cards that are available for swapping (or in the case of some of the rarer cards, for sale).

One very useful website for map postcard collectors is Tony’s Trading website, in which Tony has many galleries of his collection organised both by geographic regions of the U.K. as well as by some publishers. This has helped me to identify the many many cards that I am hunting for now!

I have started a Flickr collection of my own current cards which can be seen on the following link www.flickr.com/photos/anniefsuk/ This helps me when I am at postcard fairs so I can see if I’ve already got a card or not.

If you are interested in swapping any cards on a one to one basis, or if you want to buy one of my rarer cards (some of which are also on eBay), please contact me on anniefsuk@hotmail.com.