I suppose you have heard the awful gossip about me, eh?

Most postcard collectors focus on the images of city and country scenery, but here’s a  sampling of the messages themselves:  humor, secret codes, unfamiliar vocabulary, and, most of all, the everyday details of life in the early 1900s—a way of life that’s long, long gone.

Deborah H. Gould reads thousands of postcards a year. She spends three seasons in Brunswick, Maine, and she summers in a kayak on Flying Pond in Mt. Vernon, Maine.