Tammo Schuringa from Haarlem not only makes art, he also collects special postcards. And how: he has about 50,000! A special selection from that collection can be found in his book Delightful Babies – Birth Mapped.
In the Lunchroom program on NH Radio, Schuringa explains why he started collecting postcards. “It all started more than ten years ago on the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam. I bought a French postcard there with the image of a fish holding a basket with a baby in its mouth. I then went to find out what that was and it turned out to be a poison d’avril to be, an aprilfish. Kind of an April fools joke.”
Small collection
Schuringa was fascinated and went looking for more postcards of this kind. “In the beginning I went to a lot of markets, to the frustration of my family. But at a certain point I had seen what was for sale and I mainly bought tickets online. Eventually I came across a website where 60 million tickets Neatly arranged by keyword and then I started looking for babies. In total I now have about 50,000 cards, but there are only 800 babies in between, you know.”
“Postcards were the whatsapp traffic of the early 20th century”
In the book Delightful Babies are all printed postcards from the period 1890 to 1918. Schuringa: “That is pretty much the Golden Age of postcards. A century which has lasted less than twenty years.”
valentines
Back to the April fish, what is the background to that? Schuringa: “They are actually a kind of very early Valentine’s Day cards. You send your loved one an April fish with the message: ‘guess who this card comes from’. Chocolatiers in France still make fish around April 1 and bakers bake fish-shaped bread. They then made series of those cards and you could send them in one day. The postman came by six or seven times a day. So you could also give an answer immediately. It was actually a kind of Whatsapp traffic.”
The title says it all: in Delightful Babies birth is central. At least: how people talked about it back then. “We still know the stories that children come from the cabbage or are brought by the stork. Or you can find them in the hollow tree at Kraantje Lek. Of course people knew how the fork really was, but there was a huge culture of shame.”
Half-cooked or hot-tempered?
The book also contains a bizarre map showing people with a cabbage instead of a head. Schuringa explains: “That has to do with the Bakker van Eeklo – a Belgian city. If you were not satisfied with your appearance, you went to that baker. He temporarily replaced your head with a cabbage. Your head was put in the oven until it had the right shape. You can still see that story in the language. If your head was too short in the oven, you were half cooked. And if it was baked too long, you were hot-tempered. A misfire.”
You can listen to the entire conversation with Tammo Schuringa in Lunchroom below.