Postcards Talk

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

This slim volume introduces young readers to a form of communication
they may not have experienced—the postcard.

Active participation is emphasized. Readers are supplied with a
postcard outline and encouraged to make their own postcards. The author
provides numerous suggestions for the card’s illustration, from
collages, drawings, and paintings to silhouettes and photographs. She
even shows postcard artists how to protect their illustrations through
simple “home” lamination. Ideas for written messages are also
presented. (For those who do not want their messages to be readily read
by the idly curious, Granfield suggests ways of producing hidden
messages.) There are instructions for creating a “folding” postcard
and for making a postcard album.

Interspersed with all the how-to information is a great deal of
interesting trivia about the history and use of postcards over the last
130-plus years. The illustrations consist of Thurman’s full-color
cartoon-style drawings and reproductions of postcards from private
collections.

Elementary teachers could use the book to link language arts and art
classes. Recommended.