Alan Sager, Quincy, Illinois

Alan Sager collects postcards — small-town scenes, mostly, and the closer they are to his hometown of Quincy, Illinois, the more he’s willing to pay for them.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time, Alan admits, when he thought postcard collecting was “stupid” — he couldn’t understand why anyone would bother. That changed as he found himself drawn back to the past. “This world has gone completely insane,” he says, and somewhere in that feeling was a pull toward nostalgia — toward the small towns and local scenes postcards happen to capture better than almost anything else.

These days, Alan doesn’t go looking for cards in the towns they depict. “Don’t go to the town that the cards are from, because you ain’t going to get it,” he says. “Go to the shows.” That’s why he makes a point of traveling to postcard shows across the Midwest, where the cards actually surface.

Alan used to be a regular at the Chicago show, before his friend Tom passed away and the show went quiet for a while. When it started back up this year, the May event felt like something of a test run — and it worked. A lot of the same familiar faces from that show are expected to return for the one coming up at the end of October.