Karl Soffel appears to have been a Swiss zoologist and naturalist, as well as an illustrator. I wasn’t able to find out much about him or this life. All I was able to ascertain is that he wrote books about birds and other animals. I also found the following curious notice in, rather bizarrely, the Nappanee Advance News from 1 August 1906: “Karl Soffel, of Paris, the well-known naturalist, has discovered that snails snore. He was experimenting with several specimens, which he had placed in a glass jar in his library, and one evening while writing he noticed a peculiar noise issuing therefrom. It sounded like a person snoring in the next room. M. Soffel approached and found that the snails were sleeping soundly and snoring peacefully, the loudest snorer of them all being the one that had lived among grape vines.” Whoever he was, his postcards are amazing. They were all published between 1899 and 1901 by Verlagshaus Salis in Munich.