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Last Post* for Britain\'s Card Habit? One of Britain\'s few distinctive contributions to world culture may be doomed, according to a survey that suggests holiday postcards are being emailed and texted into extinction. More than half of the 1,000 holiday-makers interviewed said they had decided to send fewer cards, turning instead to their electronic rivals. A quarter of the respondents dismissed postcards as old-fashioned and slow to arrive. A further 14% admitted that thinking of something to fill the space was too challenging, compared with a call home. Although officially invented by a Hungarian, Emanuel Herrmann, in 1869, the idea of illustrated cards was taken up with most enthusiasm in Victorian Britain, joining Gothic architecture and landscape gardening as fields in which the country excelled. "If the British postcard did become extinct, we would lose for ever something of great importance to the nation," said Chris Mottershead of Thomson Holidays, which commissioned the poll. He was backed by Marie Angelou of Sussex University, who has investigated the importance of sending and receiving postcards. "Postcards are nothing like phone calls, instant texting and direct photo shots via the mobile," she said. "All these are useful, practical devices, but postcards offer something else, something additional that is not mundane and simply functional, but imaginative and personal. They can evoke the real atmosphere of your holiday in a way that nothing else can do. They\'re also for more than a moment--with some people adding them to collections built up over years and years." Postcard-collecting, or deltiology, is third only to coins and stamps in Britain\'s allied tradition of collecting things. The country\'s uniquely postcard-related achievements include the invention in 1902 of the "divided back". With the address taking up half of the writing area, brief postcard scribbles became the precursor to today\'s cryptic text messages. | 
