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Hi all, I have noticed that almost every shop near where I live has now stopped selling postcards. The ones that do still sell them seem now to only sell postcards that are very thin and flimsy, and are printed on card-stock that is very ‘glossy’ and smooth. Such cards are just-about usable if one wishes to write on them with a ballpoint (😱), but are pretty-much useless if one has taste and discernment and wishes to write with a fountain pen. I have, therefore, started looking online at the ‘box sets’ of postcards that are sold by various companies/museums/stores in order to cater to the ‘postcrossing’ community. Obviously, many postcrossers are going to be content to use ballpoints for their hobby, and so I expect that many of the box-sets of postcards that are aimed at that market will be as worthless to fountain-pen-users as are the majority of the few ‘tourist’ postcards that one can still buy today. I personally live in the UK, and I am thinking of ordering one or more of the postcard sets from the V&A museum in London, or the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or perhaps from other similar institutions here. But that’s just me. My personal interests are parochial and trivial in comparison to my overall goal in starting this thread, which is as a future reference source. I am starting this thread in the hope that those of you have managed to find box-sets of postcards that are printed on fountain-pen-friendly card stock - no matter where in the world - will list them here for future reference. Please therefore do add any fp-friendly postcard box-sets that you have found, and where (country and/or shop/website) you managed to find them. My thanks to you in advance for your answers. Slàinte, M.

Continuing on a theme of letter writing to some extent.... It wasn't all that long ago in the USA that interstate long-distance calling was a battleground for companies, "local long distance" phone charges were real (and really expensive), and that letter writing was more common well before then. Yesterday I did something that I realized I haven't done in a long time: I wrote a handwritten letter to respond to a handwritten letter. I commented on this to a few people and I've had some good conversation around it and the nostalgia of writing letters. Yet I digress. We have the FPN Post Office, and there's a similar and very long thread on another forum site that is just fascinating to read. Even though a lot of is mundane - "I sent X letters out and Y came in" - I put together that there are some writers out that that can crank out the volume. There's also InCoWriMo, which challenges people to hand-write and post (or deliver) one item for each day of February (more or less). So I ask FPN today: How many handwritten items do you put in the mail on an average week? For sake of simplicity, let's define it as letters and postcards; no greeting cars, bill payments or strictly packages. If you sent something along with the letter as part of a package (example: you sent a pen along with a letter in a box), count that as a letter. If you don't want to comment, feel free to respond to the poll anyway. I think I have all of the bases covered, but if not I'll see if a mod can adjust it. (editing: struck cards (like greeting cards) from the list to be consistent with the FPN post office).