Post Card Collection: Duncan's private legacy...

I haven't yet fully understood my fascination with post cards. Old or new, whenever a shop has them on display I find myself looking at all the different pictures and imagining people in my life I would love to send them to. I guess I'm drawn to them visually. Whenever something bright and colourful is stood before me I show interest in it and post cards always have the most aesthetically appealing covers.   On a random afternoon I entered my local bookshop 'Black Gull Books' which have a chain shop in Camden and I didn't know they were connected because as a younger teenager working in Camden Market I would go into the book shop and always find something new to read, for example I was once enticed by a book about transvestite fetish photos. So this bookshop has some pretty random stuff in it and after looking at titles of books for what seemed like forever, I stumbled across an old leather suitcase and inside it were hundreds of old post cards just waiting for me to enjoy investigating. 

The bookshop was empty with the owner, a friendly man listening to Jazz music and reading a book sat  near the till point where the suitcase was beside. He had noticed me going through tons of post cards and eventually intervened in my visual discovery. "All of these post cards belonged to one collector, you know." he informed me and immediately I was quite surprised. I asked if he knew who and he told me a very interesting story about these post cards that really gave context and meaning to them. He began (and I am paraphrasing here):

These post cards belonged to an old man who lived on his own and family had moved away to start their own families and communicated with him through post cards. He was from North London and some post cards have his handwriting where he has dated a few of them 1969/1972/1975 and had been collecting them since the early 40's and 50's which explains why most of them were in bad condition. What was more interesting though is the types of pictures this man would collect. There were many post cards of men. Topless men, fully clothed men, actors, singers, models and he would collect hundreds of these amongst many other random ones (there was even one of young Margaret Thatcher). Anyway, sadly this man passed away and when his home was being cleared by his family his grandson found his diary journal and this suitcase full of old post cards. The diary, together with the post cards, revealed to his family that this man was actually gay. His sexual orientation was completely private and he had confessed about it in his diaries. 

Before knowing this story the post cards were just pictures to me that I contextualised through my own life story but now I looked at them in a very different way and saw someone else's life through the hundreds of beautiful pictures. I decided to take home four post cards with me and felt bad for dividing his collection but wanted a piece of his story with me so I took home the ones that appealed to me and depicted something personal as well. 

These were the most visually appealing cards to me so I got them.

These post cards were written by his family and the cards are addressed to 'Duncan' which was obviously his name. 

This post is extremely random however his story touched me and I wanted to share it with the readers so I hope you enjoyed Duncan's private legacy and I will definitely be visiting this bookshop regularly to see and learn new things.

Lo.