The oldest picture postcard in the world is a postcard sent by Theodore Hook Esq. from Fulham, London, UK to himself in 1840. The illustration shows a coloured caricature of Post Office scribes seated around an enormous inkwell.

The postcard may also be the most expensive, selling in March 2002 for £31,750 to collector Eugene Gomberg, of Riga, Latvia, in a telephone bid at the London Stamp Exchange auction. It is the only postcard to have a Penny Black stamp. Before this postcard was discovered it was thought that postcards originated in Austria, Germany or the USA in the 1860s.