Abstract
BEFORE MISUNDERSTANDING OCCUR I should explain at once that this essay has nothing whatsoever to do with the latest esoteric theories of library management. It concerns the rather more gentle art, or science, of collecting picture postcards of libraries. An innocuous pastime, you will agree, and one which may be indulged in without fuss or bother or, indeed, any great expenditure of time, energy, or money. It all started when I received cards from two ex‐students, one from Port Elizabeth, the other from New Hampshire. Admittedly the first featured the Mayor's Garden, ‘flanked by old buildings and modern structures,…a quiet refuge in this busy port and industrial city’. But there, large as life and twice as ugly, behind a monument of the old Queen, stands the Public Library, built in that curious mishmash style typical of the last years of Victoria's reign. The second was of the tower of The Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., a 1928 building but in a style strongly reminiscent of a James Gibbs eighteenth‐century church. For someone who has always suffered from an over‐developed magpie instinct it was enough, and this highly specialized branch of deltiology took its place in the long line stretching back through books, old comics, postage stamps, matchbox labels to the very beginnings of car numbers.
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