Anyone with an interest in the cultural heritage of the United Kingdom during the first half of the twentieth century will inevitably find themselves drawn towards picture postcards.
They were enormously popular, and millions were manufactured, depicting just about anything and everything in the lives of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
But there is a catch: although deciphering the handwritten messages on the backs of used cards can be enjoyable in its own right, the photographs on the fronts very often tell us almost nothing they are silent snapshots of the past.
In those days, just as it is now, a day at the zoo was a break from routine, an enjoyable diversion. However, the passage of time has gradually revealed some fascinating and marked differences between then and now.
These postcards show a politically incorrect world where giving a lighted cigarette to a chimpanzee was not considered out of the ordinary, where enticing a bear to climb a pole to earn a tid-bit or riding on just about any animal that would tolerate it, was the norm, all part of the fun. We Went To The Zoo Today... takes a close look at this world.
The postcards featured would almost certainly be impossible to duplicate as a collection of originals and, even if that were not true, it would take years of searching and many hundreds of pounds, to gather a comparable set.....
TO ORDER PLEASE CLICK
HERE
HERE
A great little book - I picked up a copy recently and it's full of fascinating old postcards.
ReplyDelete