Romans advised that fortune favors the bold. In Sweden, luck never gives, it only lends. In the United States, the harder you work, the luckier you get. The Arabic proverb says, “Throw a lucky man into the sea and he’ll come up with a fish in his mouth.” A Brit might be lucky at cards, unlucky in love. In Japan, the day you decide to act is your lucky day.
Edwardian postcards had a curious set of symbols to call forth fate and fortune. Horseshoes, shamrocks, roses, and playing cards. Small and slightly worn at the edges, these vintage greeting postcards have traveled more than a century carrying a providential wish.
Only one card in the collection actually says Good Luck. The rest offer best wishes, happy hours, and kind thoughts from me to you. As we’ll see, luck is borne of relationships (and circumstances) lifted by the charitable wish for health, wealth, and wisdom.
Some say that luck can be earned, but only a fool pursues it outright. We daydream about what fortunes may be in store, and sometimes ignore the simple sparkles that appear each day. We know, of course, that there are no free lunches. Yet, we are admonished to never look a gift horse in the mouth.
The bold assume they earned their lucky breaks. The humble suspect they’ve borrowed fortune temporarily. The superstitious are not entirely sure we should discuss it. Luck is where fate and intent find common cause, usually in the context of close friendships.
Old English had no luck. It used wyrd instead, which pointed to fate and destiny. Wyrd is the root of our word weird, which may indicate how people felt about fate. It was uncanny, inevitable, and perhaps divine. You didn’t pursue wyrd. You experienced it through awe and fear.
Somewhere around the 15th century, luk and gelucke drifted in from the Dutch and Low German. Luck was looser and more manual. Like weather, luck favored preparation and was possible to influence if you knew the right charms. The horseshoe went up above the door. The rock went in your pocket. If luck is not fate, if it is not fixed in advance, then perhaps you can do something about it. Perhaps it can be courted.
The lucky person is not the one who waits but the one who steps into the room. This is luck as a reward for courage, or at least for motion. Fate deals the cards, and we each have a hand to play.
Fortune favors the bold — fortes fortuna adiuvat ~ Terence, Roman playwright, around 151 BCE
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and preparation is something you control. The solo pursuit of fortune is a genuine drive.
The harder I work, the luckier I get. ~ Samuel Goldwyn
But the shamrock gently disagrees. Four-leaf clovers are natural anomalies, not personal achievements. We can’t earn one, only discover it. Even if you can court luck, even if work and boldness can pull it toward you, it is never yours to fully command.
Luck never gives; it only lends. ~ Swedish proverb
Some people simply have it, inexplicably, in ways that have nothing to do with preparation or boldness or a rabbit’s foot.
Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. ~ Arabic proverb
Some observe that luck is a finite resource and can be unwisely traded away. This may or may not be true, but as a matter of human priority it is clarifying. We each get chances to test our luck.
Lucky at cards, unlucky in love. ~ English proverb
The tension between fate and will, between earned luck and divine luck, is located in a moment of commitment. The lucky day is not the day something falls in your favor. It is the day you decide it might be worth the effort.
The day you decide to do it is your lucky day. ~ Japanese proverb
Whatever the senders intended and however the recipients replied, these cards demonstrate how providential language holds us together in anticipation of something wonderful just ahead. The possibility that things might go our way.
The symbols of luck nested together in relationship, in abundance, in the living world — a horseshoe wreathed in flowers, overflowing with roses, or flanked by shamrocks — is not an accident of Victorian design sensibility. It draws on the ancient wisdom that friends are the true source of life’s lucky breaks. Love does the work and luck gets the credit.
Fröken Susanna Pettersson of Sunnansjö, Sweden couldn’t vote, couldn’t earn, and couldn’t easily leave her small village. But in 1903, she could receive romantic postcards. She kept them. But, did she reply?
Rare Cards ~ Four Antique Swedish Postcards Sent to the Same Young Woman
In rural Dalarna, Sweden around 1903, a young woman named Susanna Pettersson receive four romantic postcards from three suitors in nearby towns. All the postcards arrived through the local mail to an address at Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö, in the wooded heart of Swedish folk country.
The honorific Fröken printed before her name on every card tells us she was unmarried. In early twentieth century Sweden, it was a title with genuine social weight that was relinquished upon marriage. For Susanna, the boundaries of daily life were drawn by family, church, and society. The careful correspondence of courtship may have provided a sense of choice.
In these years, postcards were at the absolute peak of a golden age. Dominated by the German printing industry and distributed across Europe and abroad, romance cards were a technically sophisticated and lucrative niche in a rapidly growing economy.
These exquisite cards were chosen deliberately by suitors to convey a range of emotion, laden with symbolic images and verses of serious sentiment. In our case, the hand-scripted messages are overt. To send such a postcard was a cautious and considered act, even a declaration. To receive four such cards suggests a woman who inspired intention.
In the early 1900s, Scandinavia was reckoning with questions of identity and sovereignty that touched daily life and daily culture, woven in with the cultural flowering of Larsson, Lagerlöf, Ibsen, Grieg, and Munch. Sweden itself was unsettled. The union with Norway, in place since 1814, was fracturing toward its peaceful but charged dissolution in 1905.
Borlänge, just down the road from Sunnansjö, was growing fast around iron and steel, drawing young men out of villages like Susanna’s into an industrializing economy. The authors of these cards may themselves have been young men who moved away to seek their futures, writing back to Susanna across a widening distance of place and era.
Card 1 ~ Suitor 1 from Norhyttan
Front: An elegantly dressed couple in a richly appointed interior — man in blue-grey jacket, woman in red and gold dress — seated before an ornate folding screen painted with roses. Tropical palm in background.
Många Hjärtliga helsning av han ere…
Many heartfelt greetings from him who is [yours]…
Back: Addressed to Fröken Sanna Persson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Note the affectionate diminutive Sanna rather than the formal Susanna used on other cards. Swedish 5 öre green stamp, Norhyttan postmark, circa 1902.
Correspondence: Lower right, heavily scripted in a practiced pen-and-ink hand. Left margin written vertically. Lower left coded notation: 1. = 1.9. = 1.19. =
Nog vet du att jag älskar dig, fast du det aldrig hört af mig, min och din blick föråda val den tysta lågan i min själ.
You surely know that I love you, even though you have never heard it from me. Mine and your glance betray the silent flame in my soul.
Production and Collector Notes: Premium chromolithograph with gold embossing, likely printed in Germany or Austria. Numbered series notation, Serie 193. Embossed romance cards of this quality with intact original Swedish correspondence are increasingly scarce. Of interest to collectors of Scandinavian ephemera, Edwardian romance, and social history researchers.
Card 2 ~ Suitor 1 from Norhyttan
Front: An archetypal couple stands on a rocky highland landscape with a misty and dramatic backdrop. A man in rough tunic carries a tall staff next to a woman in flowing white dress with loose hair.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Pettersson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Swedish 5 öre stamp, Norhyttan postmark.
Correspondence: Densely written in heavy hand-scripted text running in multiple directions across the image.
Elfligt lyckligt är att änga — då ned har bäksfloden bringar men nu skralla den nu torka in text hur dyster då det blefo…
Blissfully happy it is to linger — when down the brook brings / but now how gloomy / when it became…
Production and collector notes: Sepia-toned romantic lithograph published in Stockholm by C. Ns Lj., Sthlm.Series 1339. Domestic Swedish production rather than imported German print, comparatively less common for this period and market. The heroic Nordic couple reflects romantic aesthetic prominent in Scandinavian visual culture of the early 1900s. Dense multi-directional handwriting across the image face is biographically significant. Of interest to collectors of Swedish ephemera, Scandinavian social history, and scholars of private correspondence.
Card 3 ~ Suitor 2 from Borlänge
Front: A young woman in a golden-yellow gown reclines on a chaise surrounded by red azaleas and roses, holding a small red book or letter, gazing pensively to one side. Circular vignette set against a rich gold ground with pink Art Deco lattice decoration and heart motifs in each corner.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Pettersson, Sunnansjö, Gryftångbodarma. The address variation roughly translates to ‘summer farm buildings’ suggesting that Susanna was not at her main home but was staying at a seasonal outpost. Postmark, Borlänge, 1903. Small printer’s horse mark, bottom left.
Correspondence: Rounder and more casual hand-script. Left margin may be a name or family reference.
Så härligt är ej källans öras invid en blomstertal så härlig är ej dagens ljus son tryckt få din hand.
Not so lovely is the murmur of the spring, beside a flower-tale so lovely — not so bright is the light of day, as when pressed upon your hand.
Production and collector notes: Art Nouveau chromolithograph, Serie “Liebesträume” (Dreams of Love), produced by a quality German publisher and distributed internationally, reflecting Germany’s dominant role in the European postcard market of this era. Art Nouveau romance cards with intact Swedish correspondence and Borlänge postmark are notably scarce. Of interest to collectors of Art Nouveau ephemera, Scandinavian material culture, and historians of industrializing Sweden.
Card 4 ~ Suitor 3 from Stockholm
Front: A couple in a garden setting — woman in white and gold embroidered dress seated on a bench with flowers and parasol. Man in dark suit and straw boater hat leaning toward her attentively. Flowering trees surround them.
Back: Addressed to Fröken Susanna Petterson, Tjärnsvedens, Sunnansjö. Postmark origin reads Sto-, stamp damaged, full date not legible. Almost certainly Stockholm, circa 1903.
Correspondence: Written across the upper image in a compressed angular hand, distinct from both previous writers. Faded pen and ink, with partially legible fragments.
Bätt… polset… och mer… bättre…
Better… better… and more… better…
Production and collector notes: Sepia lithograph with gold highlights published by G. L. Hamburg. Serie 1896, a respected German publisher. Hamburg-published cards with intact Swedish correspondence and Stockholm postmarks from this period are collectible. Of interest to collectors of German-published romance cards and Edwardian Scandinavian ephemera.
Susanna Pettersson lived in a world that offered her limited formal choices. But in a small wooden house in Dalarna at the beginning of the last century, she could make her own quiet judgments. She could choose carefully.
Three suitors, three futures. Did she answer any of them? Whether she eventually became Fru or remained Fröken, we can’t discern from the evidence here. All we know is that she kept those four cards all those years.
The postcards in this rare set were sent from the heart of Dalarna, Sweden — the same province that gave the world the iconic Dala horse, a brightly painted wooden folk toy whittled by loggers and miners during long Scandinavian winters. In 1869, Swedish immigrants from Dalarna carried that tradition across an ocean to the Kansas prairie, founding the town of Lindsborg — known today as Little Sweden USA, where you can Hunt for Wild Dalas!
Valentine’s Day is over. The chocolates parceled out, consumed in a binge, or sweetly regifted. The cards are in a stack. Love trudges on.
Before we go, there is a word worth saying about silences and the quiet costs of delayed connections, and those missed entirely.
In May 2023, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that stopped me mid-scroll. Loneliness had reached epidemic levels in the United States. He was not describing the usual suspects—a widower, a loner, someone at the edge of class or condition. I had to admit, his warning rang a bell in my own heart. I was among a growing contingent of the ordinary, ambient, alarmingly average lonely. As a caregiver, days passed without anyone really seeing me, or me really wanting to be noticed.
The Surgeon General called it a public health crisis. He compared its effects on mortality to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Actual harm done.
Indeed, social isolation raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and early death. The health research is not soft or sentimental. The body registers being unseen the same way it registers physical pain — same neural pathways, same hormonal alarm signals, same disrupted sleep, same compounding risks. We are living inside a paradox: more connected by technology than any humans in history, and perhaps lonelier than our ancestors.
In the golden age of the postcard — roughly 1900 to 1920 — Americans sent billions of them. A trip to the lake. A hello from the city. A heart, a name, a single line of longing, on full view to the mail carrier and anyone else who handled it along the way. The medium demanded brevity, levity, and a light touch.
That simple approach is worth noticing, because we tend to use the absence of time as our primary excuse for not reaching out. We sense there isn’t room in the average difficult day for a real conversation. So we wait. And the time doesn’t come. And the silence grows.
A postcard is a signal, not a report. It says: I haven’t forgotten. A brief message can make a big point. At times, the whispered delivery bears the full meaning.
The research on what makes people feel less alone points not to the depth of connection in any given moment, but to its consistency. There is comfort in the reliable sense that someone, somewhere, is holding you in mind. A brief, warm gesture, repeated, does more for that feeling than an overwrought or inconsistent one.
Simple gestures are not consolation prizes. They are the architecture of belonging.
Sadly true, is often easier to extend kindness to a stranger than to sustain the loving glow among the people you know best. A stranger on a difficult day can receive warmth without a complicated history. They don’t owe you a response and you likely won’t know how the gift was felt. You haven’t let them down in the small accumulated ways that life’s closeness allows.
The people we love most are the ones we are most likely to let drift or actively ignore. A peculiar paralysis comes with the familiar foibles, caring deeply, and feeling the gap widen.
So here is a gentle nudge, the week after the holiday, when the pressure is off and the expectations are low. Not because it’s February. Because it’s Wednesday, and someone who loves you needs to know. A postcard or a hug, a humble tug on the sleeve or a quiet walk. None of it asks or offers too much. A simple, “We are ok,” can be enough.
Sifting through the stacks this season, in search of levity and brevity.
Oh dear, a trove of kitschy postcard sets has appeared in The Posted Past studio. Careful opening boxes around here. I’ve been sorting and stocking the store this month, getting ready for the holidays.
Most of these vintage finds make thoughtful gifts for nature seekers, travelers, and art lovers. Some make for big belly laughs, too. Quit your job for two minutes and follow me.
Graphic novelist Paul Hornschemeier gives us thirty So-So Heroes, like Amalgamonster and Biggeespeare, in a nicely packaged postcard set. Bound to scare your friends, a little.
This next collection by fine artist and designer Rex Ray feels like a festive fondue party in a retro-future living room. Witty banter, wry smiles, and wood grain. Get your sweater sets.
I am Yours from Seattle-based artist Joe Park comes with a neatly-placed curatorial note from Robin Held and a lovely literary sketch by Jen Graves.
“You have seen these folks before–even if you don’t know where”
The collection does feel like finding a tiny gallery all to yourself, and a weird world of bears and bunnies. Worth the trip!
Stay Tuned by Nathan Fox is a visual romp through the artist’s fantastical funhouse. Eye-frying colors and psyche-stained scenes will make you feel like you woke up on the other side of a paranormal universe.
Anything pre-Y2K is officially vintage now. Not funny, I know. These Golden 50s throwback designs make it even worse. You’ll be thanking your lucky leg-warmers we made it out ok, mostly.
The Posted Past 