Picture postcards

This class consists of a large bundle of picture postcards collected by Nicholson, mostly depicting works of art, manuscripts and religious images from around the world. Many of them were sent to Nicholson by friends and acquaintances, and bear either signatures, brief Christmas or birthday greetings, or in some cases longer notes. Many are from personal friends and are therefore signed simply with a first name. Some of the identifiable senders, a number of them represented elsewhere in the archive include: poet Kathleen Raine and her family (/1-6); actor and director, [E.] Martin Browne (/31); poet John Heath-Stubbs (/35); and poet and lecturer on Church History, George Every [of the Society of the Sacred Mission] (/38-9).

/48-64 and /73 have no message or annotation of any kind. /47 is a postcard sent to Alison Young of London from Martha[?] in 1954, and was presumably acquired by Nicholson at some point. /68-71 are postcards of the Minack Theatre in Porthcurnow, Cornwall, where Nicholson's Prophesy to the Wind was performed in 1953, which were sent to Nicholson in a Cornwall County Council envelope.

It seems that Nicholson treated his picture postcards as objects apart from correspondence, even when they were sent to him by regular correspondents. There was no apparent order to the bundle of postcards, although in some cases those sent by the same individual were grouped together. Here the main bundle of postcards (/1-64) has been arranged chronologically according to the date given by the writer or the postmark, and those sent by the same individual have been grouped together. The postcards which have no message or signature are placed at the end of the bundle. /65-73 are postcards which were loose in the archive, and have been added to the end of the main bundle by the archivist.

Some of the writers included here are represented elsewhere in the archive, namely: Kathleen Raine (NCN1/1/11); George Every (NCN1/1/95 and 1/2/11/9); and John Heath-Stubbs (NCN1/1/175 and 8/2).