For someone who never actually tested positive for the coronavirus, Clarissa Ferraris sure has a house full of it. The virus is on hundreds of postcards that the Columbia, Md., collector has amassed over the last three years.
There are postcards of health-care workers battling the spiky globular virus, of cityscapes emptied by the pandemic, of fanciful outfits designed to maintain social distancing (a hat six feet in diameter, for example). So many covid-related postcards have come out in the last three years that Clarissa and a fellow collector have created an online database of them. They’ve posted lectures on YouTube about this very specific interest, too.
“Postcards have always been a witness of what happened,” Clarissa said. “So it was logical that there would be covid postcards.”
And it was logical that Clarissa would collect them.
“I’ve been collecting since I was probably 13,” Clarissa, 67, told me.
She started when she found 2,000 postcards that her late grandfather had amassed. That was in Italy. Her grandfather, she said, was something between a collector and a pack rat, which probably describes any of us consumed by the desire to acquire … things — or lots of a certain thing, anyway.
Postcards, Clarissa said, are especially collectible. That’s because a single postcard can appeal to myriad types of collectors.
“A postcard can have a carriage with a horse in a small town and some people dressed in folkloric costumes,” she said. “There could be many different reasons why the postcard is taken by three different collectors. For some it’s because of the horse and carriage. For some it’s because of the village. For some it’s because of the costumes the ladies are dressed in.”