Amazing vintage postcard collection

Well-traveled Zurich businessman Adolf Feller began collecting postcards in 1889 and soon amassed a large archive of images.

Many of Feller's postcards depicted scenes from around his homeland, like this photograph of a crowd in the Swiss town of Glarus.

This card postmarked 1926 shows a funicular train on Switzerland's Jungfrau Railway, which connects to Jungfraujoch, the highest station in Europe.

This genteel beach scene depicts a resort near the Polish city of Gdansk. The postcard is date stamped January 28,1923.

This enigmatic street scene shows Untere Bahnhofstrasse in the Swiss city of Zurich.

Rows of tents are seen on the beach in this card from France's swanky coastal resort of Biarritz dated 1929.

This postcard dated 1907 is simply titled "sledging."

A charming scene of skaters outside the Cresta Palace in the Swiss resort of St. Moritz. This card is date stamped 1923.

This colorful card from 1926 is captioned, "The beach and the villas, winter and summer resort. Nice."

Another Zurich street scene, this one from 1919, with an oddly colored orange sky.

Geneva's Pont des Bergues is seen stretching over the Rhone river in this card from 1903.

A 1919 scene from the lakeside Swiss town of Neuchatel.

This over-painted 1926 card shows an "Arab carpenter" at work. It's not clear which country the card depicts.

Subtitled "calm/tempestuous" this card shows a quartet of aboriginal babies in British Columbia, Canada, in 1921.

Not all vintage postcards displayed picture "postcard" scenes. This one from 1906 shows refugees gathered in San Francisco's Union Square.

Cartoon-like sumo wrestlers are seen in this 1924 card that also depicts Japan's Ryugoku Bridge.

Sent just two years before Feller's death in 1931, this postcard shows two men in Uganda demonstrating, according to the caption, "a primitive method of fire making."

This card postmarked 1906 depicts a "Maori beauty" from the New Zealand town of Dunedin.

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• October 9 is World Post Day, celebrating the 1874 creation of the first postal union


• Swiss businessman Adolf Feller began collecting postcards in the late 19th century


• His collection contains 54,000 postcards from 140 countries

(CNN) -- Long before our traveling friends had Facebook and Instagram to taunt us, they had postcards.

So what better way to celebrate World Post Day, marked annually on October 9, than thumbing through one of the biggest archives of postcards ever amassed?

Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller began collecting the cards at the end of the 19th century as souvenirs from trips taken to expand his electrical goods business.

Friends and relatives soon pitched in to help supplement his hoard, which passed to his daughter, Elizabeth, on his death in 1931.

The collection contains more than 54,000 monochrome and colorful over-painted photographs depicting scenes from 140 countries, including New Zealand, Canada and Uganda.

Some of the best postcards have been gathered in a book, "The World in Pocket-Size Format: The Adolf Feller Postcard Collection," by Monika Burri. It's available from Swiss company Scheidegger and Spiess.

World Post Day celebrates the creation of the first post union in Feller's home country, Switzerland, in 1874.

Postcards appeared about the same time, with picture postcards following soon after.

MORE: Postcards vs. the future: Endangered travel items

Accidents and natural disasters

Back then, postcards weren't just for stirring envy among friends and relations.

Eerie skies in Zürich, circa 1919.

They were often used to send day-to-day messages rather than just greetings from vacation spots.

As well as idyllic scenes, Feller's collection depicts cultural differences and news events, such as accidents and natural disasters.

Such postcards were often gathered in albums as mementos in the same way that subsequent generations would collect family vacation snaps.

Sadly, the sending of postcards is now a tradition in decline.

In 1951, 4.5 billion were delivered in the United States, falling to 1.4 billion in 2010 and fewer than 1 billion today.

It's interesting to speculate how Feller would've adapted to the world of online updates.

As a businessman whose work involved technology, it's possible he would've been ahead of the curve, tweeting and uploading images from his travels.

Then again, such was his enthusiasm for his collection, a post-postcard world might've lacked the same appeal.

MORE: My crazy postcard collection