A massive ocean liner looms dramatically from the card — bow-on, red-and-buff funnels against a stormy sky, a tiny tugboat dwarfed in the foreground — while embossed gold lettering on the hull reads "Groeten uit Rotterdam" (Greetings from Rotterdam). A small die-cut pocket is set into the ship's hull, and from it unfolds a concertina strip of miniature Rotterdam views. Rotterdam in the early twentieth century was one of the busiest ports in the world, and the choice of a towering steamship as the visual metaphor for civic pride is entirely fitting; the publisher, J. Sieding of Amsterdam, clearly understood that the city's identity was inseparable from the sea. A traveller — perhaps a merchant named Hendrik — might have tucked this into correspondence bound for family inland.