How it all started

My adventures into postcard collecting and dealing started with my mom, of course. She was a dedicated lover of ephemera, and passed that love onto me. I can remember (and still have) her sending me vintage postcards when I was just a young girl, away at camp. She'd put a blank sticker over the back if it had already been used (which makes me cringe now), and write a note and just send it along through the mail again with a new stamp.

Mom had an eye for beauty. She could pick out the one good card from a huge boxful of junk. She had an unerring instinct for what was collectible, from shells at the beach, to antiques, to postcards. She just knew somehow, when something was right. It's a skill you can learn, up to a point, but there's also a quality to it that must be inherent, in the genes, and my mom had it.

I began buying and selling postcards about ten years ago. It all started with a trip mom and I made to an antique mall near the small town where she grew up. They had hundreds of dealers, and that day mom and her sister and I spent the entire day there, with a short break for lunch, then back at it. We rooted through the various dealers stalls, looking for the special cards that she liked to collect, and in the process I came to realize that I liked this hobby too, and wanted to do more with it. At that time eBay was relatively new, and I was new to it. I had a small business there selling collectibles like pottery and so on, three-D stuff if you will. After that day at the antique mall with mom and my aunt, I went home with a big pile of postcards to see how they'd do on eBay. They did very well, and I was hooked!

I sold postcards on eBay for about three years, making quite a fair job of it for a part-time seller and part-time mom. I tapered off the year we bought four horses and some goats, it just wasn't possible to keep up with all that and milk goats at the same time. But I always kept my love of Deltiology, and often mom and I would talk on the phone about her postcard hunting trips and whenever I went home we'd pore over her albums with glee. It was a love we shared, and something that we could always talk about for hours on end.

Mom died last year, and left behind thousands of cards. My dad has no interest in them, and I don't have the space to house her huge collection. I've gone through much of it (some is still back at home waiting to be poked through), and have started listing the cards on eBay for my father. It's a bittersweet process. At one point mom and I had talked about trying to contact a large greeting card company and licensing her images to them, but between the two of us we never quite got around to it. But she had a name all picked out, and it's the one I'm using now: KatyDid, after a book that was a childhood favorite of hers, "What Katy-Did."

So now I have a second shop on eBay (still have the other one for my own cards), sending mom's cards back out into the world for others to collect and treasure. It's hard for me to let go, I am not quite the pack rat my mom was, but I believe in saving history when I can. I've pulled out some of the best of each of her albums, and perhaps may publish a small book of her collection. As I work with her cards every day I can sometimes hear her voice telling me to look that publisher up, or check that artist, guiding me along as I go down this road. I know it's not the business we had envisioned, but I hope in some small way that the customers I work with feel the integrity I strive for, and the love that mom and I both put into the cards we're selling. Any other way of doing things just wouldn't be true to either of us.