Every year we holiday in Austria and Germany usually staying in the small village of Oberau in the Tyrol. It’s a beautiful place with skiing in the winter and lovely mountain walks in the summer a real picture postcard of a place.

Upon returning from one holiday, I decided that it would be interesting to research the history of what had become our favourite destination and tried to look for old images of Oberau and the surrounding villages. I soon discovered that a good way of doing this was to start looking for old postcards and now I have quite a collection.

The first postcards were issued in fact by Austria and Hungary in 1869 by Dr Emanuel Herrmann and made in two sizes. A year later postcards were introduced to Britain and imprinted with a halfpenny stamp which was half the price of a letter and by 1871 around 75 million postcards were sent in the UK.

The official term for collecting postcards is deltiology and Queen Victoria was known to have a collection of postcards.

Picture postcards were not accepted at the Post Office until 1894. It wasn’t until 1902 that there was space to write a message on the back along with the address. To begin with a message was written around the picture.

As well as topographical views there are many collectors of World War 1 silk cards which were sent back by soldiers to their loved ones, early football teams, stations, poem cards etc.

Another area of postcard collecting in comic cards. The main and most sought after were made by Bamforth & Co. who started to produce postcards in 1903 in Holmfirth near Huddersfield and soon became the world’s largest publisher of saucy postcards. Over 70,000 different images were produced with illustrations from people such as Douglas Tempest, Donald McGill and Ben Fitzpatrick.

The value of old postcards is affected by many variable factors, but demand, condition and rarity often have the greatest influence on how much a postcard is worth. The first thing to do is to determine the age of the postcard as the vast majority of cards issued after 1960’s have very little value. Postmarks of course help us to date cards and cards larger than 5 x 3 inches are usually post 1960. Condition is always important try to avoid postcards with bent corners or staining, a pristine unsent card will always have attract more interest.

Sheffield Auction Gallery had the privilege of selling the Tim Hale collection of over 10,000 postcards of Sheffield in 2019 which raised over £27,000. The collection was put together over 50 years and was a real pictorial history of Sheffield and the surrounding villages throughout the years.

If you would like to buy or sell any old postcards they are always much sought after and included in our Fine Art auctions which are held quarterly.