The Fascinating Story of Note Cards

By Julia McLemore

It’s funny how a couple of short words on a portion of folded card can make us feel better, or put a big smile on our face when we are feeling down. The greeting cards industry is massive business, and it now looks like there exists a card for virtually every occasion you can think of, and possibly far more that you can not. There are currently such a lot of different cards available, it really doesn’t look like far too much of a stretch to imagine that the greeting card industry basically invented some of those special occasion days on their own, just so they could sell more paper joy. All of which doesn’t answer the question, where and how did the card giving tradition essentially begin?

It’s actually believed that a pair of ancient civilizations, the Chinese and the Egyptians, both had a version of what we now view as greeting cards. The Chinese would send messages of good luck to their friends on New Year, while the Egyptians went a little further, writing greetings and sending them on papyrus scrolls. Like many modern traditions, the greeting card next showed up in 15th century Europe, where Germans would deliver by hand, wooden carved messages to each other. In other countries of Europe, Valentine’s Day cards became extremely popular, with the first card came into being from the early 1400′s.

That type of exchange more or less stayed in place up until around 1840. It was then that the idea of the postage stamp became commonplace , which meant that sending messages became far easier, and a lot more affordable than the intricate, hand produced greetings of the past. While some of those more attractive greetings continued to be around for a few more years, the arrival of mass printing, about the same time as the stamp, all but put a close on that sort of delivery.

A man named John Calcott Horsley was commissioned to design the first ever Christmas card, which was quickly followed by the first official Valentine’s Day card, which was first released by a woman named Esther Howland. In the United States, a lot of the credit for publishing greetings cards goes to Louis Prang, who opened his own print company in Boston in the mid 1850s, and the cards generally remained very fashionable until the end of the century when their usage fizzled quite a bit.

That all changed in the 1930s, when advances in printing and color lithography saw greeting cards make a triumphant return. The cards developed even farther in the 50′s, when funny cards were initially introduced, but the real explosion came in the 1980s, as that is when the usual birthday, Xmas, and Valentine’s cards were joined by those celebrating some lesser known holidays and events. Greetings cards are still well-liked to this day, but they have taken yet another turn, with e-cards now being delivered online, with a great many of them custom made by the sender. As long as there are days to celebrate and mourn, there’ll always be cards with the perfect words for the occasion.

The author is a Michigan artist specializing in floral note cards.

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