Postcards, history and the souvenir hunter
What constitutes a good memento of travel?
Kate Holden recently reflected on this in The Age (A2, 20 October 2007, p.3), noting that you can buy Vegemite and Tim Tams in London (so no point bearing these as gifts) and you can get most things in Australia, so what then is worth bringing home as a souvenir?
Photographs and vintage postcards she concludes. On her recent travels she happened upon ‘a cache of correspondence’ at a market in Rome, among a lot of vintage postcards. This series, written on standard issue postal stationery, represented a long correspondence in the life of an early twentieth century Italian family. What a find! Archivists and historians will immediately appreciate the significance.
And what did she do?
With regret, I chose five. Signore Mazza, I am very sorry to have broken up your correspondence. Perhaps I was wrong – but I also didn’t want to be selfish and take them all. The five are enough. Someone else will find the rest one day and never know what’s missing.
Aaaghh! The written life of everyday people is so much harder to find than that of the well-to-do. The archives of the everyday do not as commonly end up in archival and manuscript collections. They may be tossed out with the inevitable moves and clean outs that follow death. In this case, someone has realised the value to philatelists and postcard collectors and sold the lot to a dealer.
Holden continues, ‘I have mixed feelings about removing these photos and cards from their native lands – are they trophies or detritus, or have I saved them?’ Good question. If she hadn’t broken up the collection someone else would have, but perhaps not. Perhaps somebody might have bought the whole collection and offered it to a public collection in Italy where it would gain immeasurably in significance in its local context. Removed from their context and fractured like this they have become mere trophies. They haven’t been saved. That she cherishes them isn’t enough.
However, wince as I might about this story, I’m of a mind to agree with her about the value of the vintage postcard. Wandering the aisles of the Paris stamp bourse in 2003, I hunted for old postcards of Bordeaux, where I’d recently been researching for Blue Mauritius. I found several in pristine condition, never postally used. Propped up on my desk at home in Australia, they helped me to write (I hope) in a more evocative way about Bordeaux’s past.
I had no qualms (price paid excepted) in removing these from their homeland, because they had, almost a hundred years later, fulfilled their original purpose.
Dear Helen
I never usually either find or respond to blogs that mention me, so please don’t mind me popping up here — I’m so pleased you noticed my piece, as it sounds like you’re a fellow scavenger — and yes, I did have such qualms about splitting Sig. Mazza’s correspondence. I did hesitate. But to be honest price was a factor. And I perhaps didn’t realise the significance of such a find; they were in a popular market for anyone to find. But I might ask a friend in Rome to go back to the market and see if the rest of the cards are there. You’re so right, they are one of those unique troves…
Anyway, I wish you well in your own foraging, for mementos as well as inspiration.
Kate Holden
Hello Helen,
I also read Kate Holden’s column in the A2 and, with all due respect to Kate, had the same reaction you did; the fact that Kate is sending her friend in Rome back in the hope of retrieving the rest of Sig. Mazza’s correspondence is some comfort.
I confess I have the same impulse as Kate and you when it comes to souvenirs, scavenging markets for vintage postcards, photographs and correspondence. But when I see people in places like Cuba selling their family mementos to tourists who, whilst appreciative, have no sense of their context and significance, my overwhelming instinct is to buy the items in order to give them back. Not that this solves the problem in the long term.
Is the solution for appreciative audiences - archivists, historians, philatelists and writers like ourselves - to buy up this material for the greater good? Or do we kid ourselves that we are anything other than trophy hunters in a different guise?
Thanks for a great post. And thanks Kate for a thought-provoking column.
Angela
Thanks for popping up Kate! Much appreciated. I did wonder, although you hadn’t mentioned it in the piece, whether price was a factor - I can understand that.
I wonder how many people would think of libraries or archives when faced with such caches of correspondence, when it comes time to get rid of it. The majority of us would probably think of stamp collectors/dealers as the first port of call. What does that say about how we as archivists, librarians and historians communicate the value of what we do?
Angela, that’s awful that people need to do that in Cuba - I had no idea. Archivists jump up and down about the value of heritage collections in museums being destroyed during times of war or great natural catastrophe, but I’ve never heard this situation raised as a cause for concern before, and it should be on a number of levels.
Thanks both for your comments.
When faced with the decision about what to do with caches of correspondence, perhaps it depends in part on what the subject of the correspondence is. Collecting archives get many, many offers of grandad’s letters etc - if grandad was a soldier. People have no trouble with the idea that however mundane the papers, if they are war related they are connected to a grand narrative and must be significant. Relatives often want to assert grandad’s place in that narrative. The “ordinary people, extraordinary lives” concept is very easy to sell in relation to our military past.
But it’s all different if grandad was a bricklayer or a barber or a clerk for 40 apparently uneventful years. The situation is probably even worse for women’s records.
So yes, we all have more work to do to get the records of the every day out of the market place and into archives.
Hi Helen,
If they’re anything like American goods in London, the products will be very expensive to obtain, and therefore welcomed as gifts!
Good point Julia! Thanks for dropping by.
Anne-Marie, I very much had women’s records in mind in writing the above. I know this to be the case from my marginal work with the Australian Women’s Archives Project, both at the individual and organisational level.
Do you think collecting archives are only interested in grand narratives, or use space considerations as an excuse to ignore the more “ordinary”?
Hi Helen,
Dunno. But my impression is that many collecting archives - including the one in which I work as an historian - do try to collect the archives of the ordinary and do try to work against the grain of the grand narratives. Whether they successfully make this known to the broad community of potential donors is another matter. In the absence of any national study of collecting policies, or national framework for collaboration, it’s a bit hard to know that the gaps are.
Hello again Helen, I forgot to add that there is stuff one can read on the issue I raised in my previous comment (about co-ordinated approaches to collecting).
Adrian Cunningham, ‘The mysterious outside reader’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24 no. 1, May 1996.
(Quote page 132: ‘There is a notable absence of any systematic and co-ordinated process for the identification, appraisal and transfer of personal records into the care of archivists.’)
And this, nearly a decade later:
Michael Piggott, ‘Building collective memory archives’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 33 no. 1, May 2005.
(Quote page 75: ‘Until gaps are identified and remedial action taken we will not approach a collection achieving representative of the whole of Australian society.’)
Both footnote other commentators.
Not that I have researched this issue; these are just some things that come to mind.
Hi Helen
Just one further note (and thanks for the reply to my comment!) — have you read Barbara Hodgson’s new book ‘Trading in Memories’? She’s a publisher and author and a mad keen collector of ephemera. She seems to cherish her finds as artefacts and as aesthetic objects, though she is careful to always recall the provenance of each find. The book is lovely and full of wonderful images of markets, old photos etc. Worth a look, though it might make you flinch at the wanton gathering of fragments…
Thanks Anne-Marie for those references. Something for me to get stuck into back at work (reading Archives and Manuscripts on maternity leave doesn’t seem right!).
Great reference, thanks Kate! Saw the book on display yesterday at the Melbourne Uni Bookroom and it was well priced for an illustrated hardback, so bought it. It’s a gorgeous production and I look forward to reading it over Christmas.
Cheers, and thanks all for the discussion, which has been most fruitful!