Although the private Parisian postage operator Petite Post was already offering readable messages as a product as early as 1760, it was still another century before the first, official, state-produced postcards appeared. On October 1, 1869, the so-called “correspondenzkarte” was introduced in Austria-Hungary. It featured a printed postage value. The regional states of Germany followed suit and released an equivalent medium shortly afterwards.

The “illustrated postcard”, as it was officially called from 1872 onwards, achieved its commercial breakthrough around 1896. The inventions of chromolithography and the rapid press allowed for the cheap mass production of colour images. Where post messages were once purely textual, these innovations meant that the image took centre stage in postcard design. At the same time, postcard production shifted increasingly towards the private sector, as greeting cards, Christmas cards and, above all else, holiday postcards became widely popular. The ability of postcard designs to clearly reflect the aesthetics and trends of their era made them into much coveted collector’s items, with the medium generating particular interest among the collectors of the early 20th century. In 1927 they were assigned the standard format that they still carry to this day. Their popularity has declined sharply in recent years however, as a result of the all-encompassing supremacy of electronic media.