I bought this turn-of-the-century penny postcard thinking it was among the ugliest things that I’ve seen. Online, the red anchor looked almost gory. The ocean liner? is all wrong for a card that reads “Best Wishes from Portsmouth, NH.” But on arrival, it turned into something else.
“It’s just lovely,” a friend told me, unwrapping it from the plastic shipping package.
“It is?" I replied. “Looks to me like open heart surgery.”
But it feels amazing, all fuzzy and bumpy. I hadn’t noticed online, but this is actually two cards glued together, a back and a front. The front surface is hand painted – a brown ship, blue water, and a pinkish anchor. The surface is richly and delicately embossed. The lines on the ship, the rigging, the portholes, the waves, and the decorative squiggles on the anchor all press out to the touch. The words jut out as well. There even appear to be tiny embossed faces looking out the ship’s window.
The reddish blur in the online auction photo is actually a few inches of scarlet ribbon delicately threaded in and out of the shank. I learned that name by Googling “parts of an anchor.” The top bar below the “ring” is called the “stock.” The curved bottom is the “crown” and the hooked piece at the end of each arm is called the “fluke,” which is divided into the “palm” and the “bill.” That’s all I know about anchors in a seaport town that was once full of them.
So what I thought was the ugliest postcard yet, turns out to be ideal for the upcoming romantic holiday. You’d be surprised how many Valentine’s Day cards feature similar designs. They inevitably read either “You anchor me” or “You’re my anchor,” with the rare (?though no more clever) “Ahoy, Valentine.”
Traditionally a sailor got a small anchor tattoo after crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The anchor, according to one source, represents salvation, composure, calm and steadfastness. While this ?postcard ?appears to be from the early 20th century, for Victorians, the anchor symbolize?d “hope” because early Christians used the anchor as a disguised cross during periods of persecution.
(Illustration courtesy of the author’s collection. “Historic Portsmouth” is presented every Thursday or Friday by J. Dennis Robinson, whose 12 history books are available in local stores and online. He can be reached at dennis@mySeacoastNH.com. This is image number 710.)