The Postal Service recently issued a set of four stamps celebrating Postcrossing, a global project that enables its participants to send and receive postcards from random people all over the world.
Since its launch in 2005, more than 800,000 people in more than 200 countries and territories have mailed more than 87 million postcards. However, there is one aspect of the hobby that often puzzles newcomers: the “maxicard.”
Maxicards are postcards that combine stamps, postcards and imagery in especially thoughtful or creative ways.
The stamp on a maxicard is placed on the image side of the postcard — not the address or message side — and is postmarked on the image side as well.
When the postcard artwork, postmark and stamp all share a thematic connection, collectors call this “maximum concordance,” the term that gives maxicards their name.
Here is an example of how to create a maxicard:
• Take one of the Battlefields of the American Revolution stamps from 2025, which displays a photograph of the Old Barracks Museum in New Jersey, where Hessian and British soldiers were housed before the Battle of Trenton;
• Place that stamp on the image side of a postcard of the barracks or George Washington’s famous Delaware River crossing prior to the fight; and
• Then get the card postmarked with a relevant place and date, such as a Post Office in Trenton on the Dec. 26 anniversary of the battle.
Along with its Postcrossing stamps, the Postal Service also released a set of four maxicards. Each card is affixed with a stamp on the front and cancelled with the Postcrossing first-day-of-issue postmark.
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