Postcrossing Blog

Sometime ago, we stumbled on this unexpected topic on the forum, where postcrosser Meowpurr tells her adventures of mailing postcards from the deepest postbox in Germany… so of course, we were intrigued and wanted to bring it over to the blog, so that more of you learned about it. Here she is, ready to take us all along on a dive into the deep unknown!

"As someone who loves both postcards and the underwater world, you guys can imagine I’m thrilled to announce that… Germany finally has its own underwater mailbox!

It’s 19 meters deep inside Kreidesee Hemmoor, a lake north of Hamburg, and a genuine Divers’ Disneyland. The water is very clear (for a lake 😉), the lake is ~60m deep, full of things to explore underwater, and it’s only open for divers — no regular swimming allowed! 19 meters deep makes the mailbox significantly deeper than this wonderful place I can’t wait to visit too.

A little over a week ago, a freediving festival took place at the lake, and this is why I was there too. Not knowing anything about the new mailbox, I was busy from mornings to evenings doing workshops, making new friends… Doing regular things like repairing cars…

… when a diving friend from Berlin texted me that the lake’s Facebook account had just posted the glorious news! I don’t remember ever letting him know about my postcard shenanigans, so I guess I must have given him a drunk post-dive speech about postcards and stamps (I guess you all know what it’s like). Well, good thing I did! I started my little side quest to find the mailbox, and tadaaa:

It even states the collection time (“weekly”), tells us that waterproof postcards can be bought at the reception, and that it’s Germany’s deepest mailbox:

The next side quest began because my tight festival schedule hardly allowed me to visit the reception with its constant queue of arriving scuba divers (but of course I made it happen ), and because said reception had screwed up buying waterproof pens for their waterproof postcards! I tested the one they sold me in the sink: came off straight away 😱 They did have a thick green one I could borrow – good enough, but I was so relieved the addresses I drew didn’t have a delicate script like Chinese!

By the time I mailed the cards on the last festival day my legs felt completely useless and I was frozen – it was those cold days in the midst of the heat wave, with only 22°C air temperature and only 12°C in the 20m depth region. Mailing those cards was the very last thing I did before literally breaking down.

The card itself is posted without the stamp, so the diving mail carriers (?) attach it themselves. Of course I reminded the receptionist that international mail requires more postage than national, haha, postcrossers’ paranoia… Would have loved to see their faces when they saw one of their first postcards is going all the way to Vietnam!

Now, this is the card:

And this is it, Postcrossing reaching new depths! 🎉

And there’s a happy ending too: the first card arrived! I can’t wait to go back and mail some more, and I hope I get to spot some more underwater mail on people’s walls!"

Good news! More recently, Meowpurr went back to the lake armed with a few waterproof pens and wrote some more postcards, which have also arrived. At €6 per postcard, this is not a cheap endeavor… but a fun one, for sure! 🤿

Did you notice that the 2023 campaign of Cards for Literacy with Deutsche Post had one extra day for postcards to arrive this year? 😍 While a single day might not make a huge difference*, all of these postcards together are undoubtedly going to have a meaningful impact in a lot of people’s lives! Here’s how the campaign went this year:

What a great result this is! Well done, everyone! There’s so much promise in these numbers… so much good that can come from improving a person’s reading skills — and thus their whole outlook in life!

As always, a huge thank you to Deutsche Post, for partnering with the Postcrossing community and making this possible. We’ve now been running this campaign together for 11 years, if you can believe it, helping fun Stiftung Lesen on their various programs and research projects. We usually think of children when we think of reading problems, but did you know that there are about 6,2 million adults in Germany who cannot read properly? It’s hard to overstate how important this skill is in everyday life — from progressing in a career to living an independent life, it all starts with reading. So it’s important that those who need help improving their reading skills can receive it, and Stiftung Lesen and its partners are there to help.

And now, to wrap things up, Paulo run his script and randomly choose 6 winners to receive vouchers for the Deutsche Post shop. The winner of the big €100 voucher is Feuermaus99, and the five winners of the €50 vouchers are kuchenfee, Tazzdevil, Thekilein, Kamila_Dawid and Morle-Maus .Congratulations! 🎉 You’ll receive an email from us shortly!

(*) 140 postcards were registered on February 29, so not that few! 😊

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

It’s currently the season for international rugby in this hemisphere, and my preferred team (if you’ve been reading my writing prompts each month, you can probably guess which team) have so far lost every match of the Six Nations tournament. Unsurprisingly, then, my thoughts are drifting to other sports… preferably ones with lower stakes. Yep! This month’s writing prompt is about sport—about the kind of sport that might be unfamiliar to people from outside your own country, to be specific!

I grew up in Yorkshire, specifically in Wakefield, and quite near to the specific area called Gawthorpe. So quite regularly—every day once I was catching the school bus—I’d go past a local sign about the… World Coal Carrying Championships?! I just took this for granted as a kid: I knew the area had a history of coal mines, with the National Coal Mining Museum close by, so that all seemed pretty unsurprising, somehow.

Going past the sign again recently, though, I had to stop to wonder. Just how big could such a championship really be?! Looking at the previous winners now, most are from the local area, though I do spot a winner from Scotland in 2015. Looks like calling it a “World” championship might be a bit of an exaggeration, but hey, if you’re interested in a coal-carrying race, then I think sign-ups for 2024's event are still open—maybe you could make it one?!

For my part, I think I’ll pass… Carrying ten or so postcards to the postbox at once is enough exercise for me.

Do you know of any weird and wonderful sports in your own area? If you’re stuck for something to write about on your postcards this month, you can tell your recipients all about it—or you can comment here if you’d like to share!

Bob Eckstein is an award-winning writer, New Yorker cartoonist, and author/illustrator of The New York Times best-selling book (and postcard box set!), Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores.

Last summer, in a webcast interview from his New York-based studio, Bob shared with Clarisse (aka CStar9) his love for endangered bookstores, admitted he used to send toast through the mail, and urged creative people not to work alone.

For your World’s Greatest Bokstores project, why bookstores? And how did you narrow down your bookstore choices?

There were many different reasons why a store would be chosen: its historical significance, its importance to the community, maybe its beauty. Main-Street bookstores play so many important roles in a community, and I wanted to capture these in the book.

I have a great interest in story: people want to read something with meat on the bone. Luckily, bookstores are magical places. I profiled about 150 to 200 bookstores, and then had to choose half. I was hoping there would be a sequel!

You’ve written books about the bookstores of the world, but you’ve also written about snowmen, cats, Arctic explorers, and more. What does research look like for you?

Each of these books would have taken much longer without the internet. I make every attempt to visit and learn from a subject in person, but that is not logistically realistic, so sometimes research comes from surfing the web.

Once I find out everything I can, I try to simplify and curate the interesting stuff. That’s the glamorous part of writing a book. But eventually there comes a point where you have to stop doing that and just start writing.

You write for TV, you write prose, you paint, you are a cartoonist… Is there a medium that feels most like home for you?

It’s so much fun to create a cartoon that makes people laugh. And writing is something that I am certainly at home with.

I juggle many different things in my career. I’m a public speaker, I teach, I do cartoons for different magazines, I do illustration. It’s hard to make a living from this stuff. You have to produce a tremendous amount of work. At the moment, I’m working on four different books.

I write almost every single day. For the last few years, I’ve been waking up by 5:30 a.m. to start writing. By 9:00 a.m., I usually finish a piece. Then I can get started with the rest of my workday. That discipline is how I get so much done. I also don’t watch much TV!

You’ve said in an interview, “My deadlines are relentless [and I don’t doodle for fun]. If I’m drawing, it’s with a purpose.” Do you ever get creator’s block and if so, what do you do about it?

I have lists of ideas I don’t have time to get through.

I don’t get writer’s block, where I’m just sitting around for an idea or joke to fall into my lap. The way I teach others how to get out of ruts is this: usually it’s a matter of tuning in to the voices and ideas in your head. These days the world is a very loud place. We are all inundated with distractions and sensory overload. Taking a walk or just even taking a bath to be alone with your thoughts…it’s surprising how easy it can be to come up with ideas during those times.

You also can’t work alone. I believe the best gift a creative person can have is the ability to surround themselves with talented people.

Anything I’ve had success with can be traced back to someone who helped me: someone who gave me encouragement, who inspired me to explore something new, or who gave me a professional opportunity.

How do you narrow down your ideas?

There is so much rejection in this field. So, basically, I fold up as many paper airplanes as possible, and then I chuck them out of the window and see which ones stick.

I never actually intended to do postcards. But the opportunity came, and I went with it. I didn’t appreciate initially that the Bookstore postcards would go over so well. I always just cross my fingers that people will have a chance to see the things I work on. I know I usually sound like a have an ego the size of God’s cigar, but I was genuinely surprised to hear that for example, students were wallpapering their dorm rooms with the Bookstore postcards.

What’s your relationship to postal mail?

I love postcards. I have sent thousands of them – really! I used to send out mailings in groups of a thousand to potential art clients. I also sent jokes like poly-ethylening slices of toast and writing “Keep in toast” in yellow plastic that looked like squeeze-on butter. I eventually mailed them in plastic bags after sending hundreds with just putting a stamp on the piece of toast. Today I probably would be arrested.

I dearly miss the age of regularly corresponding with hand-written postcards. This year I sent maybe only a hundred. Email has ruined it, postage increases has ruined it, younger generations who don’t even write in script anymore has ruined it. I know I sound like an old man yelling from his porch, but it seems everything I love is going extinct -—from old-fashioned postcard correspondence to vinyl LPs, MAD magazine, and gag cartoons. I try to be a help. I raise awareness about the plight of disappearing bookstores. I’m writing a book now on our most important museums, and I’m working with a friend on a film that’s partly about climate change.

You do live drawing for events. How did that come about?

When I was a kid, I loved Sports Illustrated, and they would do drawings of sporting events. I eventually worked for them and was also a sports reporter of sorts for The Village Voice and The New York Times. So, it was natural for me to incorporate my humor and artwork to coverage.

I used to take-over the Times website front page for the Super Bowl, Olympics, or World Series. Then I did it for The New Yorker: the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc. I still live-draw occasionally to promote cultural events. It’s perfect for today when people want to see stuff as much as they want to read about it.

It’s also an example of how I like to always push the envelope, which artists and writers should always do. I’m always asking “what if?”.

It’s like the squirrel operetta I tried to make. What if?

What are you most proud of, outside of your writing and art?

It used to be my hair.

I’m very proud of my wife. She is a well-known book artist and a total bad-ass—she will hate this answer and I will pay for it later. But that’s what being a bad-ass is all about.

What advice would you give your 10-year-old self?

Growing up, there was no one who said, you’re funny, or, you should be a cartoonist. That didn’t happen until I was surrounded by friends very late in life.

My friend and mentor Sam Gross – who happened to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker – organized my birthday party one year. That party also happened to be the regular New Yorker staff lunch. The food was very good. I asked if I could come the following week and he said sure, but you also should make a cartoon and submit it to the magazine.

So I took up his dare, and the New Yorker ended up buying and publishing the first cartoon I drew. I realized later it wasn’t as easy as that. But it opened the door.

I always say to my students, you’re never going to have these things happen if you don’t show up. 80% of success is just showing up – being willing to listen to and learn from people. You never know when something life-changing is right there in front of you.

What’s next for you? And importantly: what postcards can we expect next?

This summer, I spoke at the Humor Writing Conference. A few times a month, I produce my Substack newsletter, The Bob, which has turned into a huge, pleasant surprise. I have a handful of magazine assignments to complete. As I said, I’m working on four books.

And I am looking to make a box set of postcards in 2025, of museums in the U.S.

We can’t just leave on that cliff-hanger! Tell us about the museums postcard project!

I covered 155 museums for this project. Like with the bookstores project, I visited as many of the museums as I could in person. But for those I couldn’t visit, I sent friends and other ambassadors to report back to me with their impressions and photographs.

When I went to a museum myself, first I would just go and experience the place holistically. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, what’s the best angle or the most unique view of this place that would create an incentive to people, to say, Oh, I’ve gotta add this place to my bucket list.

An example is the American Museum of Natural History, which has an iconic blue whale that hangs in the main room of the oceanic division. I felt like it would be delinquent on my part not to give people what they expect and want to see in a view of that place. And then I would make supplemental illustrations to pique additional interest. I hope people will feel a real sense of wonder when they’re exploring this project, whether they’re looking at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the SPAM Museum in Minnesota. It’s just mind-blowing that all these places exist.

I want to add that I’m still sad that the bookstore book ended. It was the same with the museums project. I did three illustrations a day. I put my heart and soul into this project and slept very little. But I didn’t mind the long hours because it was such a fun thing to do.

Editor’s note: Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums is about to be published — it’ll be out on May 14. Hopefully the corresponding set of postcards will soon follow! 😊

To learn more about Bob, check out his website and newsletter! Bob has given interviews about the long and winding road to becoming an author and cartoonist, about humor, about his book The Complete Book of Cat Names and also been interviewed for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest podcast. For the aspiring writers out there, he has some tips on publishing and writing on Writer’s Digest.

And now, for the sneaky giveaway: Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from Bob’s World’s Greatest Bookstores set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers! 🎉 To participate, leave a comment below to share your favorite bookshop. Come back this time next week to check out the winners!

Chris (aka chrisbonham11)'s profile caught our attention because of his quest to find a set of postcards featuring the Qing court version of “Up the River During Qingming”, a beautiful painting which can be seen at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Normally, when you buy a postcard at a museum, the postcard will feature a whole painting… but this 11 meter scroll has so much going on that numerous postcards were created to feature its different scenes! Chris took the time to tell us about his quest and his other passions, on this spotlight interview!

How did you get started sending postcards? What is your earliest memory of them?

When I was a child, my family and I would send postcards to relatives from our holidays. We also received postcards from our relatives from their holidays. I especially remember postcards from my Nan, which she sent from her trips to other parts of the UK.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

How exactly I came across Postcrossing back in 2014 is now lost in the mists of time, alas! I believe that I found out about it thanks to an online news article though. As somebody who studied abroad on exchange for a year during their degree, and at the time was just starting out on a career in international education, any opportunity to connect with folks abroad really appealed. I was also looking for opportunities to practice my German and Dutch, and quickly found out that there are a lot of speakers of both languages who are postcrossers. I had a little stash of postcards from museums and galleries already to hand and ready to share, so I was good to go.

Show us your mailbox, your mail carrier, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

I use any one of a number of local postboxes for my outgoing postcards, depending on where I’m heading when I head out and about. I think I saw somewhere that the UK has among the densest distribution of postboxes of any country in the world, which if true is why I have so much choice! The postbox I use most frequently though is this one, located on the university campus where I work. This photo was taken in August 2023, when it had just had a fresh coat of paint.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

For me, it is picking out the best postcard I can for the recipient. I read every profile in full, and then have a look at their received and favourite postcard galleries. I’ve developed a greater interest in (and stash of) postage stamps over the past couple of years, hence where I can I also try to use one or more which match the recipient’s interests to pay the postcard’s way.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

If I have to pick favourite postcards, they’re those I’ve been sent from the artwork Up The River During Qingming!

I’ve received parts #3 from gene1128 (TW-3307201), #6 from ipyngtsai (TW-2990803), #9 from Pe-June (TW-2524342), #23 from EmilieLin (TW-3336740) and #24 from chuanH (TW-3077188).

I bought a set of postcards of this artwork from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, when I visited nine years ago. After I shared the set with other postcrossers, I wondered if I could rebuild the set from postcards sent to me by others. Folks may have had to go to extra trouble to obtain and send me one of these postcards (and the postcrosser who sent me four cards from the set and let me know that the Museum shop was no longer selling it certainly did go to extra trouble), hence the extra appreciation. Thank you again!

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

For received postcards, it has to be Bahrain, Belize, Brunei, and Guam, four of the less common places postcrossers are from / visit in travel mode. I don’t think that any other sent postcard can match the one which took 284 days to reach its recipient in Vietnam! Never give up hope on those travelling postcards, folks, even post-60 day expiry!

Have you met any other members in real life?

For over six of the nearly ten years I’ve been a postcrosser, I beavered away at it alone. I wasn’t a user of the old forum, being a bit intimidated by the formatting. I joined the new, friendlier formatted (to me) forum in early 2021, and since then have got to know a grand bunch of people in the British Isles section. It’s a lovely corner of the Internet. I attended my first meet-up in December 2022, meeting a few of these folks and others, and haven’t looked back. I managed to attend five meet-ups in 2023, including one I hosted around Halloween in Reading. JennyAssis helped with designing the meet-up postcard for that one (thank you again, Jenny!).

What’s one way that postcards have changed your life for the better?

The whole process of Postcrossing, from drawing an address, picking out postcard and stamps, and writing a message, is an escape for me. If I’ve had a particularly large postal delivery in one day, I can spend an hour or more reading and registering postcards and writing thank you messages to their senders. During the days of Covid lockdowns, Postcrossing kept me occupied and connected to others. While others completed Netflix, I sent and received a lot of postcards!

Is there anything else that you are passionate about?

Real ale! I’ll be wandering around Reading and east Berkshire come the Spring taking in pubs on the local CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) ale trail. Postcrossing friends can attest to this: I left a meet-up last summer early so that I could return to Reading to collect the t-shirt which was the reward for visiting all the pubs on last year’s trail!

International education is also a passion; I’m still working in the field, and haven’t tired of helping students realise an exchange like I did.