letter arts review 26:4 . The Greeting Card Issue

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1The Greeting Card Issue

Letter Arts Review

Volume 26 Number 4Autumn 2012

The Greeting Card Issue

life moments like birthdays or bereavements. The form of these greetings has changed over the centuries in response to changes in society and new technologies.

The modern greeting card is largely a product of the nineteenth century. The introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in Great Britain in 1840 radically democratized the sending of messages by mail. Instead of relying on the recipient to pay for a letter on delivery, the new system of postage stamps offered prepaid service at a single, low rate. Sending letters was for the first time easy and inexpensive, and it became available to all social classes.

Another nineteenth century innovation was the advent of affordable color printing. This created a new medium for commercial artists to publish bright, vivid images for a broad public.

According to the website of the

The editor’s letter . When I was growing up, one of the explicit rules in our house was that birthday and holiday cards had to be made by hand. It didn’t matter if you could draw—the least you could do is get some colored paper or card stock, fold it, cut it to size, and make a little collage on the front.

When I was ten, my mother asked me to make Father’s Day cards for my two grandfathers. I spent an hour or so making a drawing of cartoon characters I had devised, with speech bubbles containing the words “Happy Father’s Day.” I photocopied my black and white line drawing and hand-colored each card with markers. When I showed these to my mother, she was not pleased. “You xeroxed this!” she said. The cards were duly sent off, but I had not lived up to the family bargain.

Last year, she sent me an e-card for my birthday. How times change.

People in many literate cultures have had the custom of exchanging written greetings to mark major holidays and

The images on pages 1-3 are reproduced courtesy

of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Division. The reproduction numbers (when available)

appear in the individual captions.

Valentine card, 1890. LC-DIG-ppmsca-24353

13The Greeting Card Issue

Lisa Engelbrecht

Carol DuBosch

26 Letter Arts Review 26:4

Erica McPhee

Yves Leterme

This card was published by Papyrus.

45The Greeting Card Issue

Helen Scholes

Werner Schneider

The L is missing from this alphabet, creating a “no-L” card.

In this tent-fold card, the text appears in English and German.