Free, every other Sunday · 5,100 readers
One card and one story every other Sunday, with the handwriting transcribed.
Free · every other Sunday
The Shoebox
One card every other Sunday, front and back.
Handwriting
The sentence someone crossed out
A November card from 1931, and the line its writer tried to remove.
Finds
Eleven cards from one table
What a single flea-market table gave me, and the five messages I could read.
Sorting
Sorting by colour, one afternoon
Blue, sepia, green and red: a long table, a tray of cards, a surprise.
Lisbon
Tiles on the card, tiles on the wall
A card of a tiled facade, and the afternoon I went looking for the real one.
Handwriting
Reading a loop that looks like an f
The long s, the closed a and other shapes that fool a modern reader.
Sorting
A shoebox, 212 cards, three piles
How I counted, and why I stopped at three piles.
Finds
Painted by hand, not printed
A watercolour doorway signed in the corner, and how to tell it from a print.
Lisbon
The quay in the cards, the quay now
Four cards of the same quay across forty years, and what moved.
Finds
What a stamp tells you
Value, portrait, perforation and the postmark on top: four clues in one corner.
Lisbon
June, sardines and paper flowers
Cards of the June festivals, with a message from a girl who missed one.
Downloads and courses
Shop
Download as soon as you pay. Yours to keep.
About
About me
I found my first card in a flea-market tin when I was nineteen: a harbour in sepia, with four lines in blue ink. I have been reading the backs ever since. Now there are nine boxes in my hallway, and I know most of them by smell.
Each letter is a catalogue entry in the old sense: one card, what it shows, what it says, what I think happened. I like the small things best, a crossed-out word, a stamp stuck on crooked, a message that is only the weather.