FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Is there a mis-print on the postcard I bought? The short descriptive paragraph on the back of the card has nothing to do with the image on the front. Our earliest postcards were parodies of the typical tourist postcard (the kind that might feature the image of an unappealing main street on the front, for example, but has a description on the back that portrays the town as heaven-on-earth). We felt that our cards ought to carry on that tradition of a seemingly far-fetched connection between the front and the back. Although the images on the front of our cards moved away from obvious parody, we kept the seemingly unrelated descriptions on the back. However, in actual fact, our back paragraphs do have a connection to the front. For example, on the Pig-Latin Birthday postcard, the front shows farm animals gathered around a cake. On the back, the first letter of each line of the descriptive paragraph spells out E, I, E, I, O. Another example? On the Braille postcard, the front has a text in embossed braille dots. On the back, the paragraph has an accurate translation in English text. And also the Italian translation of the English text -- for friends of the Venetian blind. We have actually been told by a number of people that these paragraphs are what they like most about the postcards. Honest.   Where do you get your ideas? The postcard images we create are developed from our own ideas, based on things we are seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking about. For example, the Pay Attention to Detail card resulted from seeing a woman whose hair was startlingly cut totally flat on the top; the challenge was to think of an interesting way to use that style of hair in a scene that would illustrate a topic we were interested in. The series of map postcards came from thinking about how the life of a person gets to the places in does -- from birth to schooling, relationships, work, and death. The original idea was to create some type of map that might show a place named Home, and then down the road might be places like School, Broken Arm, Job, Wedding, Vacation, Children, etc. Looking at an atlas, and discovering the interesting town names that actually exist, led to the creation of An Optimistic Map and A Pessimistic Map -- and we now have put together over a hundred thematic maps, ranging from Shakespeare to Astronomy to Cheese.   What's the origin of the name "Hold the Mustard"? Many years ago, in a land far, far away, one of the founding partners was continually having to ask his travelling companions to "hold the mustard" when it was their turn to prepare sandwiches. He said that it made his mouth itch. (It may be noted here that a second partner claims spinach makes his teeth itch -- but that's another story.) In any case, the phrase "hold the mustard" was still being heard with some regularity at the time a business name was needed.