A Visit to the National Postal Museum (Part 3)

Before visiting the National Postal Museum (NPM) I had been reading about it through different blogs- the NPM blog, the PostMuse blog, and James at Everyday Correspondence and his wonderful three part coverage of the museum (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) earlier this year. There were a few others as well, but I neglected to bookmark them, so if you wrote a blog post on the NPM, please comment and let me know.  It is great to see that others are as fascinated as I am with postal history.

In trying to learn more and better prepare for our visit, I began following the NPM on facebook and twitter. I also follow the news posted on the British Postal Museum and Archive.

After writing my first two blogs (Part 1 and Part 2), Abraham at La Vie Graphite mentioned a post he had written earlier this year about the history of letter forms at the Musée de la Poste (the postal history museum) in Paris. This one was fascinating to me because the museum concentrated more on handwritten letters.

In my research and travels I am finding that it's not just people who like stamps or people who like mail who are fascinated with Post Offices and the history of mail service, but there are many kinds of people- all with varying degrees of interest and preferred topics.

For example, my husband (who was such a good sport to accompany me on my 2 hour tour) has zero to minimal interest in anything postal, but was drawn to the Armed Services display (In hindsight, it could have been that this display came with a set of chairs). Or the friendly NPM store clerk who shared with me that she had not been particularly interested in anything postal and hadn't realized the NPM existed until she started working there a few years ago. Now she buys newly minted sheets of stamps and saves them in a stamp album. And that's how it begins.