Correspondence cards and postcards in Gazi Husrev-beg's Library in Sarajevo

Abstract

In the photo library stock of Gazi Husrev-beg's Library in Sarajevo, a valuable and rare collection of photographs, correspondence cards and postcards, with a total of 18 976 digitalised units listed in an inventory, has been preserved. This paper focuses on correspondence cards (postcards), illustrated postcards and postcards stored in the old photo library, made in the period from the last decade of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. It determines the exact number of the postcards and presents their contents and the time when they were written. With a brief historical account of how correspondence cards and postcards were written and developed around the globe, the paper presents domestic publishers of postcards whose postcards nowadays represent unavoidable source of historiographic, ethnographic and cultural research on Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian times and from the period of the first Jugoslaw common state.