Mavi Boncuk |This incredible collection of more than 54,000 postcards, spanning 140 countries, could be the largest in the world.
It belonged to Swiss businessman Adolf Feller(1876-1931), who started collecting them at the end of the 19th Century, and includes everything from German art to Oriental monochromes and photographs of Ugandan labourers.
He accumulated them as he travelled the world, expanding his electrical business, and friends and family helped add to the hoard with postcards they picked up on their own travels.
The collection passed to Mr Feller's daughter Elisabeth after his death in 1931, and they are now in the safe hands of Swiss university ETH Zurich[1], who have digitised them all.
Mr Feller lived on English shores for three years - he worked as a salesman in Leicester between 1897 and 1900.
He then spent eight years in Catania in Sicily, where he managed a citrus fruit business, before founding his electrical goods company Bollier in Horgen, back in Switzerland in 1909.
[1] The Image Archive of the ETH-Bibliothek has around 2 million images relating to the following topics:
• Scientific and technical history of Switzerland and of ETH Zurich
• Collection of features, images of countryside/places and aerial photos focusing on Switzerland
• Swissair Photo Archive
• Archive of the photographic agency Comet Photo AG
Digitised images are being put online on a constant basis. The images in web quality are subject to the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND and can be downloaded for non-commercial use.