New collecting craze goes viral in China. It involves mushrooms, with Yunnan the hotspot

New collecting craze goes viral in China. It involves mushrooms, with Yunnan the hotspot

Move over, Pokémon Go. A new collecting craze is taking over Chinese social media, with the most coveted finds not digital critters but… mushrooms. Morels, black tiger palm mushrooms, milk-caps, blackening brittlegill, termite mushrooms and matsutake are just some of the species for which young fungi fans have been foraging across the country, before posting … Read more

Portrait cards that sparked a Victorian collecting craze – in pictures | Art and design

Portrait cards that sparked a Victorian collecting craze – in pictures | Art and design

After discovering an album of Victorian cartes de visite in an antiques market, Paul Frecker gave up his day job to become a dealer in vintage photographs. Now collected in a new book, these cards were “a photographic craze that seized the imagination of the British public at the beginning of the 1860s,” says the … Read more

How postcards still make people feel special, and the online groups that help users exchange cards with others around the world

How postcards still make people feel special, and the online groups that help users exchange cards with others around the world

We may be living in an age of digital communication but there is a worldwide network of snail-mail lovers who appreciate the thought that goes into writing postcards, those small picture cards that have been mailed primarily by holidaymakers since 1869, when the first was sent in Austria-Hungary. Himanshu Agrawal from Nepal with some of … Read more