POSTCARDS: In response to a recent ’Round the Square regarding postcards, and how almost nobody sends them anymore, a reader dropped off an article that appeared in USA Today.

It’s about a little place in Perryville, Md., a 15,000 square foot former car dealership stuffed to the gills with about 10 million postcards.

“It’s like going to a museum,” said Philadelphia’s David Bower, who visits the business every two years.

Mary L. Martin Ltd. was founded in Albany, N.Y., in 1962 by the current owner’s now deceased mother of the same name.

Commercial picture postcards got their start in Chicago in 1893 and postcard collecting became an American craze from 1904 to 1914. It began to fade when World War I began, because many of the printers were German.

Clubs revived the hobby in the 1950s and USA Today reported in the article that “it’s not unusual to see more than 100,000 listings — from a single card to a lot of more than 1,500 — on eBay” today.

Martin’s shop puts on the York International Postcard Expo, which USA Today said collectors consider to be one of the largest postcard shows in the world. The International Federation of Postcard Dealers website, ifpd.info, offers links to dealers located across the U.S. The organization, of which Martin is vice president, currently has 99 members, according to the website.

Martin said the business is lucrative, offering cards in rows of library-style shelves stacked with boxes by topic such as Movie Stars, Ships, Girl Scouts, Marilyn Monroe and Holiday Inn. She told USA Today the cards for sale range from a few cents to $20.