As a believer in lost causes and dying forms, I do wonder what fate awaits
the picture postcard. I used to love sending and
receiving them, but now I wonder how much longer you’ll even be able to find them.
There was apparently a time when any self-respecting restaurant, and even many a
humble diner, would have postcards printed up as a way of spreading the word about themselves.
And in fact one or two still do – I picked up the one above in a pretty
decent Spanish restaurant in Manhattan, but it kind of lacks style - and in any
case nobody ever thinks you’re going to send them through the post. In the age of the tweet and Instagram, who
can be bothered to find a stamp and a mail box?
So, on my travels in New York I was delighted to pick up, in a bookshop
actually (another dying form), a couple of rather wonderful old postcards. The one above for the Horn and Hardart
Automat, a place that still has a mythical status as far as I’m concerned. And this one below for Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant.
When I bought it I’d have said I’d never heard of Sloppy Louie’s, but
then I remembered, or realized, that it (and its owner Louis Marino) features
in Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel,
which In fact I read fairly recently.
I’m not sure that I’m exactly a postcard collector,
but I do pick up interesting ones when I see them; the more curious the better,
naturally. But few old postcards are
quite as curious as this one I picked up in Kingston, New York, advertising
a current program called “Ales For Alzheimer’s.”
I’m sure it’s a good and well-meaning cause, and if
you wouldn’t necessarily think that drinking beer was the most obvious way of fighting
Alzheimer’s, at least, unlike the elephant on the card, booze may be a way of
forgetting rather than remembering your troubles. Cheers indeed.
So naturally I started thinking about other charitable options:
champagne for shingles, cocktails of colon cancer, rickeys for rickets, cider
for cystitis, negronis for necrosis … I could go on. I won’t go on.
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