Yet another excellent exhibition in the Tipperary South Riding Museum in Clonmel affords a fascinating glimpse back through almost a century in time. The street life, the shop fronts and the dress style of the early 1900s are depicted in the display. The exhibition, "Wish You Were Here" - a broad selection of postcard scenes of towns and villages - has just opened and will continue until September 12th.
The museum has delved into its collection of over 800 postcards to assemble a composite picture of streets, buildings and places in the county as they looked at the turn of the century.
The exhibition also outlines the origins and development of the postcard, and of the pastime of postcard collecting. The early postcards, issued from 1870 on, were plain, pre-stamped cards with one side available for a message and the other reserved for the address.
These became a popular and inexpensive form of communication. By 1902 the postal regulations had relaxed and postcards with both the address and the message on the same side were permitted - allowing the other side to be dedicated to a photograph, cartoon or other image.
The ability to send images through the post became the craze of the day, and the universal souvenir - the picture postcard - was born. Postcard albums could be found in most households in Edwardian Britain and Ireland.
The craze declined after the first World War, which resulted in the suspension of international mail and higher printing costs, while the general introduction of the telephone and improvements in press photography also took people's attention away from the postcard.
However, the prosperity of the 1960s and the nostalgia boom which accompanied it revived interest in the hobby, and postcard collecting became and remains a marketable activity.
The Clonmel exhibition shows examples of the novelty postcards that were published in the early years, and also of the cards which were fashionable in wartime and the commemorative postcards issued to mark topical events.
For people in south Tipperary, the many images shown of towns like Cahir, Clonmel, Cashel and Fethard are of particular interest. They depict street fairs and stalls of the time, carriages and carts, and people, young and old, posing or at leisure.
There are monochrome photographs from the extensive Lawrence and Valentine collections, and examples of the colour postcards produced from the 1950s on by the John Hinde Company.
Also well represented is the work of Robert A. ("Sonny") Cash, the best-known and most prolific producer of postcards in south Tipperary. Partially crippled as a boy when his back was broken in an accident, he grew up hump-backed. He took to photography as a teenager - the earliest Cash postcard in the museum is postmarked 1904, when Sonny was only 15.
Working from his father's shop in Main Street, Carrick-on-Suir, he travelled the surrounding countryside in a sidecar and built up a large collection of photographs, many of which he produced as postcards.
He died in a fire at his home above the studio in Carrick, and all the glass negatives of his work were destroyed. The postcards, now collectors' items, are all that remains of this important historical record.
The museum exhibition has been assembled by Fiona Flynn and Anna Meehan, who also curated the recent People's Show - a display of the diverse objects and artefacts gathered by private collectors in the region over the years.