It starts as one card and turns into an afternoon lost reading the cramped handwriting on the back: a stranger's 1912 vacation, a postmark from a town that no longer exists.

The hunt through dusty shoebox lots at fairs is half the pleasure and half the maddening sort through hundreds of duplicates.

You'll spend more on storage sleeves than you mean to, and slowly your sense of a place becomes a stack of tiny printed histories.