Over history, as a number of these features have repeatedly shown, postcards have been put to the most diverse uses besides their primary function of carrying brief messages through the mail.

Today, I will home on postcards as pocket maps of Malta and Gozo.

For millennia, before GPSs made themselves existentially indispensable, man had only the stars, the compass and maps to rely on for orientation in space.

Giovanni Bonello, under the imprint The Art Studio, published this postcard map of Malta, showing the bus routes.

Among the thousands of early postcards issued for Malta after 1898, those displaying maps do not feature abundantly. In fact, they prove rather rare. One of the pioneers happened to be my grandfather, Giovanni (also John) Bonello (died 1920), a postcard publisher in his own name or under the trade name The Art Studio.

He issued one of the earliest, if not the very first, postcard map of Malta, which has the added, and useful, value of marking all active bus routes. Xarabank services had started in 1905, first running between Valletta and St Julian’s but, slowly, the network grew to cover virtually all Malta and Gozo.

An early postcard map of Malta by the unknown photographer Hugh Scifo.

The early black and white Maltese map postcards display a disheartening lack of design creativity. Various publishers monotonously repeat the same themes: a map and a woman in faldetta on the left-hand side.

Before GPSs, man had only the stars, the compass and maps to rely on

Competition between publishers may have been cutthroat but good copyright lawyers must equally have been scarce.

An engraved map of Gozo published in 1802 by Louis Boisgelin. Postcard by Antique Topography

The Grand Studio published this map of Malta postcard.

A postcard map of Gozo by Mikiel Farrugia, il-Badiku

Though, usually, the contours of the map contained the physical characteristics and names of localities of the islands, some graphic artists let their creative fantasies run amok.

St Aloysius’ College issued yearly a postcard with miniature portraits of its alumni and teachers in the shape of a map of Malta. This was published in 1937.

A good example of this would be the annual postcards published pre-war by St Aloysius’ College, in which the peripheral outline of Malta frames miniature portraits of all the alumni and teachers.

One postcard of the 1913 International Eucharistic Congress by Eugen Paul Goetz displayed a map of Malta.

All postcards from the author’s collection.

An Italian postcard showing the large mural map of Malta in the Vatican.