How I Source
Behind the first Postmarked Paris mailing.
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Packing for March in Paris is challenging. The weather can be unpredictable, with spring hinting through the clouds, but also chilly and wet. You pack rain coats and umbrellas and warm sweaters, and resign yourself to a particular shade of gray that settles over the city until mid-April. This trip was different. I stepped off the plane into sunshine and warm air that lasted almost a week. It was unseasonably beautiful. Even the Parisians seemed caught off guard by it.
I was alone for the first five days. After, I would co-host the Paris Curated antiques buying retreat. But until then, it was just me and a list and a city behaving better than I had expected her to. I had come specifically to source the first Postmarked Paris dispatch.
I source differently than I shop. Shopping is reactive; I wander in stores or markets and respond to what I love, or what moves me. Sourcing begins before I arrive. It begins with a question: what am I looking for, and why? For the Postmarked Paris mailing, I needed objects that speak to each other. Papers that tell a story when put all together. I am looking for the right things, pieces that feel intentional.
I had a theme for this inaugural mailing (which I will reveal at a later time) before I left New York. I had a list of what I wanted to find and six markets to hit, plus a loose route through several antique booksellers and stationery shops scattered across arrondissements. I deliberately skipped the large, famous market that every visitor goes to and focused instead on smaller, more esoteric ones.
My first stop on my first morning was a vendor I knew from previous visits. I had decided in advance that I would buy vintage postcards from him because I knew his stock and I knew what I was after. Sometimes it matters most to check something off your list right away, so you feel a sense of accomplishment.
He was still setting up when I arrived. The postcards were scattered across two large crates, thousands of cards within each, and I unstacked them myself in the early morning quiet and went through them one by one. I was looking for beautiful images on the front, beautiful handwriting on the back, and a range that included both written cards and blank ones not yet filled in. I went through every single one while the vendor finished setting up around me.
On Saturday alone I went to three markets. Two were large and well traveled. The last one was essentially two men with folding tables in a small square. I bought something at all of them.
It was at the two folding tables that I spent the most unexpected hour of sourcing. The men had bins of vintage stamps, and I went through them by hand and selected over a thousand French ones. Preparing for Postmarked Paris has made me genuinely interested in stamps in a way I wasn’t before; I love it when the research pulls you in directions you don’t anticipate. Going through stamps that were exclusively French meant I kept finding examples of Marianne, the allegorical figure who has appeared on French postage since the Revolution and whose face has changed with every era. A different Marianne for every decade. I kept finding her, over and over, each time slightly different. I stood at that folding table in the sunshine, chitchatted in French with the vendor about everything and nothing, and lost track of time entirely.
I finished my sourcing in a short yet productive few days. Postmarked Paris existed, at least in my mind and in the folders and bags I had brought to hold it all. The days that followed were a different pleasure, generous, outward-facing, full of other people’s discoveries. But the work that mattered for Postmarked Paris had already been completed across five warm days in a city that was, for once, cooperating completely.
What I found will be in your mailbox later this month. It is old. It is paper. And it carries, I think, the particular weight of things that were made to travel.
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On my last free morning, before my retreat group arrived and my focus became something else,
