POSTCARDS can be sublime, or ridiculous, or make the sublime into the ridiculous. These days, there are holographic postcards, Banksy postcards, nostalgic postcards, you name it; but a huge proportion will always be garish colour photos of beaches that are 20 years out of date.

Once, it was all so much loftier. At least, that is the impression I get from a new book, The Postcard Age, that visually surveys what it defines as the great age of the postcard, from about 1880 to 1930.

It celebrates the extraordinary collection of Leonard A Lauder, who has been collecting postcards since he was a child. As chairman-emeritus of Estee Lauder, he could probably afford bigger things but Lauder writes passionately of his pleasure in seeking out rare postcards.

Art nouveau — the florid style that shaped everything from Metro entrances to chairs in the age of Oscar Wilde — was perfectly suited to the postcard. This simple form of communication, with a picture on one side and room for a short message on the back, depended for its birth on the creation of reliable, easy-to-use postage, which relied, in turn, on a new worldwide network of railways and steamship routes that by 1880 made the planet seem smaller than it had ever been.

Many early postcards were simple photographs, depicting everything from Michelin tyres to Paris cafes. But others were playful concoctions that shared the exuberance of Toulouse-Lautrec posters. In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust portrays late 19th-century postcard snobbery. When a character crippled by social hauteur gave postcards to the young narrator, these were always paintings of famous places, rather than mere common photographs. And early postcards did go out of their way to glamorise places and people with lavish drawings, bold colours and curvaceous lettering.

The past is another country, they say. How strange and haunting to get a postcard from there. — The Guardian, London