Postcards

Rule No. 1 for Italian travelers: Don't assume the neatly wrapped sandwich sitting next to the cashier is for sale. At a Cesano Pariol snack bar Friday afternoon, I bought a bottle of water and the emaciated Italian version of a ham and cheese sandwich. I took the food to my desk and had consumed about a quarter of the sandwich when the cashier came sprinting toward me, screaming something that an Italian colleague translated as, "The idiot American is stuffing garbage in his mouth!"

Chester County is a well-documented place, but don't thank the early Quakers and their propensity for record-keeping. Part of the credit could be given to Arcadia Publishing, a Charleston, S.C., company that has found a niche market here for its pictorial histories. Since the company published its first Chester County book in 1997, (Images of America: West Chester, three years after the company was founded) it has produced 12 more that touch on the county. Arcadia's specialty - regional, pictorial histories - delves into the kind of subjects that were once the exclusive domain of local historical societies or self-published authors.

One of the worst-kept secrets in Pennsylvania politics will be revealed next month: Lynn Swann is a candidate for governor. The former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver is expected to announce his plans to seek the Republican nomination at a Jan. 4 rally in Pittsburgh. He will make six stops across the state, including one in the Philadelphia area Jan. 6. His political committee began sending postcards this week to 15,000 supporters touting a "major announcement" on Jan. 4. "If it looks like a swan, walks like swan, and talks like a swan, it is probably a swan," said spokesman Ray Zaborney, responding to the question yesterday of whether Swann would announce his candidacy.

THE INTERNET is ablaze with criticism of the planned tribute to Flight 93 at its crash site in Shanksville, Pa. Color graphics superimposing an Islamic symbol over the contemplated row of maple trees are all over the blogs, and do raise a disturbing issue: How can its designers justify an Islamiclike crescent at the very spot where radical Islam killed 40 innocent Americans? Last weekend, I went to take a look, accompanied by a busload of 47 of my radio listeners. On board was Ed Root, 58, a retired business analyst who lost his cousin Lorraine Bay when Flight 93 crashed at more than 500 mph. Ed served as a juror in the selection process responsible for the final design.

Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Philly to advocate relief of Africa's crushing debt and pervasive poverty and hunger - incredibly worthy and complex goals. Me, I'm a bit obsessed with a much smaller, less important goal but one still worth pursuing. I am standing in the periodicals aisle at Borders, shaking all the periodicals upside down, then collecting and counting all the postcards that fall out. Three tumble out from Fortune. Glamour lets go four.

At first blush, picture postcards may seem like a trivial kind of collectible. Mass-produced, you might say. Like collecting pebbles, you might say. But the 70,000 cards that will be offered by Barry S. Slosberg tomorrow in Port Richmond reveal a diversity far more complex than variations on "Wish you were here. " That's one reason so many people collect them, said Spencer Gorman, who cataloged the sale: "Cards are the second-largest area of collection, after stamps and ahead of coins.

For the next four months, Reading is celebrating the life and career of Samuel L. Schmucker, a city native who worked as a commercial artist during the golden age of American illustration a century ago. Schmucker isn't as big a name in the field as Maxfield Parrish or Jessie Willcox Smith, his classmates at the Howard Pyle Institute at what is now Drexel University. But he did make a significant contribution to postcard art at a time early in the 20th century when postcard-collecting flourished.