About a month ago I blogged about that phenomenon of the Victorian postal service, the ‘Too late’ postmark.

Well I couldn’t resist, and ended up buying an example for myself from a dealer in Vienna.

It’s a prepaid international postcard (hence the 1d stamp as opposed to the green ½d domestic stamp) to an address in Vienna.

It had obviously been posted too late to make the mail boat to Europe and as well as a postmark had been stamped ‘Too Late’ by the British post office. Unfortunately the date of posting is illegible, but the Austro Hungarian postal authorities had also stamped the postcard 8.7.92 (ie 08 July 1892) to show when it had arrived in the Vienna sorting office.

Flipping it over, I’d expected a fairly standard message along the lines of ‘arrived safely, food and weather both terrible’, bit it’s actually more interesting than that

it’s an order acknowledgement from Sampson Low, Marston and company, who, as I know from my work cataloguing the historic book collection at the Athenaeum, were a major nineteenth century publisher of fiction in Britain, and by extension the British Empire.

Ephemera like this show that not only were Sampson Low supplying distributors in the UK but that they were handling orders from across Europe …