Anyone who lived in Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s should buy this book - it truly lives up to its name. There is no text at all, the dreadful colour and black and white postcards certainly just speak for themselves. The postcard photographs provide excellent illustration to the social history of the UK in the decades post-war but why anyone would wish to buy such a postcard at the time might bemuse people (unless you are in the photograph or unless your car is depicted or your house or street)! My favourite - it's hard to choose - must be "The Tourist Information Centre, Fort William" - it's part of the railway station and shows a dreadful one-storey building of around 1970, an empty taxi rank, ugly cars and a pick up truck (but at least it's not raining!). Hard to beat, though, are these (and, remember, they're postcards intending to send to a friend or relative!): "Transport & General Workers' Union Recuperation Centre, Littleport", with folk self-consciously posing for the camera; ""Austin Taylor Factory, Bethesda" (not all the factory, either, mostly the empty road outside the factory) and "The Drive In Bottle Shop, Northampton" (at Billing Aquadrome). The last photograph is entitled "Rain Clouds, from Southend Pier" - the mayor and local tourist board must have been so pleased with this one! The colours are horrid, the cars ugly, the clothes naff, the architecture awful and much of the photographic composition is truly terrible. The whole pictorial feast presents a terrible image of my country in my teens and twenties and the book is, therefore, so bad that it is brilliant. It's worth buying before those who knew it well are no longer with us. It's good for a laugh, too! ( )

Many of these postcards are not boring in my view. Take the Market Centre, Scunthorpe, the Butts Shopping Centre, Reading and the Foyer, Ocean Hotel, Sandown, Isle of Wight as just three examples. They are period pieces of great social history value.

Presented beautifully printed onto heavyweight paper, with plenty of white space surrounding them, postcards make a brilliant topic for an art book from Phaidon, masters of the subject. Also these postcards from around fifty years ago, that would have seemed completely boring twenty years ago, are now absolutely fascinating to look back on with our love for all things retro at the moment.

What is really amazing is how much of that brutalist concrete architecture still exists; there are views of several town centres that I know intimately and still recognise most of the features today. These were the days when flying was a luxury, caravans by the sea were more likely to feature in holiday plans, and if you had to drive there, the new motorways and their service stations were all part of the experience - all are represented here in all their glory! ( )

Few books manage to capture the stupidity of certain printed matter the way Boring Postcards does. You'll find yourself wondering why for 176 straight pages. In the end the collection is much more than the sum of its parts and one finds that putting it down is next to impossible. ( )

This is a brilliant book. At first it seems as though Parr is taking the piss but more I flick through the postcards of townhalls, shopping centres, motorways etc the more I sense that Parr has great affection for these subjects and time when these carsd were produced. ( )