The postmark: the small ink circle that dates your memories
Published on 21 September 2026 · 3 min read
Look at the top right corner of any postcard you've received: over the stamp, a circle of black ink, a town name, a date, sometimes a few wavy lines. It's the postmark, the cancellation, or just "the stamp on the stamp". You barely notice it, yet it's what gives a postcard its official birth date. "Date as postmarked" is a phrase we all know from competitions and tax returns, but the story behind it is a lot older than either.
1661: a stamp to catch late deliveries
The first dated postmark was an English invention. Henry Bishop, in charge of the Royal Mail, was tired of complaints: letters dawdled, and nobody could prove where they'd been held up. In 1661 he introduced a small circle split in two, showing the month and the day, struck on every letter as it reached the office. It wasn't meant to look pretty; it was meant to hold postal workers to account. The "Bishop mark" is the distant ancestor of every postmark in the world, and its logic hasn't changed since: a dated trace that nobody can argue with.
When the postage stamp arrived in 1840, the postmark took on a second job: cancelling the stamp so it couldn't be reused. For decades clerks stamped by hand, thousands of times a day, until machines took over towards the end of the century. Those wavy lines beside the circle are their signature, the ink waves left by the cancelling machine.
A postmark that does the advertising
In the twentieth century, post offices realised this tiny space passed under millions of eyes. So the slogan postmark was born: next to the date, a little drawing and a line singing the praises of the town of origin. "Its beaches, its pier", "Its cathedral, its wines", "Come to sunny…". Some towns used it as a free poster for decades, and postmark collectors now hunt them down the way others hunt rare stamps.
There are also postmarks people go out of their way to get. The one from Santa Claus's post office in Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle. The ones from temporary post offices set up for a festival or a fair. A card stamped there tells a little more than the others: it proves you were really there.
The date nobody wrote
Perhaps the best thing about a postmark is what it does years later. You find a card in a drawer, you recognise the handwriting, but who thought to write the year? Nobody. The postmark did. August 1987, Whitby. Without it, half of all old postcards would be memories with no date. At UnCoucou we love that idea: you write from your phone, we print your photo in premium quality and post it for you, from €2.49 all inclusive. Your card then makes the real postal journey like any other, and keeps the trace of it. Thirty years from now, someone will turn it over and know exactly when you were thinking of them.