Advice in starting seriously collecting

Hello fellow collectors,

I’m a seasoned collector but a novice in postcards. I’ve been a long time collector of well… collections. Over the years my extended family got into the habit of giving me the collections they kept in their teenage years, basically because I’m the only one that keeps collecting as a hobby.

I’ve to admit postcards were never one of my top collections, I just organised the 1960-1980 postcard collection I was given and left it to rest in a card box. Then one day I started thinking about making postcards one of my main collections, first I thought about collecting postcards of the town I live in, but it’s a relatively new housing area so there’re no cool vintage postcards to look for. Neighbouring cities were popular beaching areas in the 1950’s so there’s a lot of interesting postcards about them, but they are very sought-after and demand high prices. After that I thought about collecting postcards of thermal resorts, there’re a lot of them in my country (Portugal), and they have been popular since the XIX century so there’s a reasonable amount of postcards about them. I hadn’t really gotten to start looking for them yet and this was just an idea.

A couple of days ago I was at a flea market and spotted a box of postcards, they looked amazing and I spent a lot of time flipping them. They ranged from 1910-1950 (maybe even earlier - I just looked to the stamp date), but mostly 1910-1918, and came from over the world from small town America to “heart of darkness” Africa. From patriotic German Great War postcards to risqué flappers, etc. Some of the postcards alluded to the fact that they were part of a “collector’s exchange”. Google told me that the original owner of the collection was kind of important in his days, he has a Wikipedia page and all… How did a Portuguese colonial officer stationed in Mozambique and Angola (I even think one of the postcards had some type of military checklist scribbled in the back) ended up trading postcards with a mid-western American (that sent him really cool RPPC from Illinois)!?

Anyway, they were 1 postcard 3€, 2 postcards 5€ and there were about 100 – 150 of them. I ended up not taking any with me, but after doing some research about them I’m even a little tempted to just try to buy the whole collection next week. I fell that even cooler than each postcard individually is the fact that they are a collection that took someone 40 years to assemble and it may be a good foundation to a “golden age” collection. Nevertheless this looks too expensive an endeavour, at this price 150 postcards would be 375€. I’ll probably fish for the cooler ones, any advice in what to look for?

Sorry for the long post and thanks for reading.