Valentines Day Postcards

Today, antique and vintage Valentine postcards from the Victorian and Edwardian eras are generally collected rather than given away—proving, perhaps, that for people who are serious about old paper, love has its limits. Sweethearts had been trading Valentines centuries before the postcard was introduced in the late 19th century. But the Valentine postcard turned out to be the ideal medium for messages of love for a brief window of time. The United States Congress first allowed printing companies to produce their postcards in 1898, and by 1901, Americans were sending postcards with images on the front and the address on the back. In 1907, Congress passed a law allowing a "divided back" postcard to have space for both a hand-written message and the address on the back, allowing an image to dominate the front of the card, and that's when the postcard industry flourished. Postage for a postcard was only 1 cent, and many American towns had mail delivery twice a day. In London, the post was delivered to each address 12 times a day. At the time, most ordinary people didn't have their own telephones, and telegraph operators charged per word, so postcards were the email, text-messaging, and Twitter of the turn of the century, a.k.a. the Golden Age of the Postcard. By then, companies like Raphael Tuck & Sons in London and McLoughlin Brothers in New York were already known for producing lush chromolithographed images, which lent themselves well to Valentine postcards. Top publishers like Raphael Tuck—as well as International Art Publishing; John Winsch; and the Gottschalk, Dreyfuss & Davis Co., all based in New York state—outsourced their finest Valentine illustrations to Germany, whose printers had mastered the art of chromolithography. Other U.S. companies—including McLoughlin, Detroit Publishing Company, the Reinthal & Newman Publishing Co., and the Edward H. Mitchell Co.—printed their Valentine postcards at their own stateside printing shops. In 1910, the United States imposed a tariff on German-made cards, which eroded the popularity of postcards—World War I brought German production to a halt in 1915. During the war, paper and ink became prohibitively expensive, hindering the postcard industry for a few years. By the time men had returned from battle, telephones were the preferred means of communication. In addition to featuring a greeting or rhyme, Golden Era postcards are covered with fat babies or Cupid-like cherubs, plumped-cheeked toddlers, and precious little girls and boys. Americans and Brits in the Edwardian era were just mad for cute kids; they couldn't get enough of them. Female illustrators including Ellen Clapsaddle, France Brundage, Grace Gebbie Drayton (The Campbell Kids), Rose O'Neill (Kewpies), and Richard Outcault (Buster Brown) made a name for themselves painting or drawing adorable, dimpled children. And they drew mostly white children—although you do see racist Jim Crow caricatures of "pickaninny" children featured on vintage Valentine postcards. Clapsaddle churned out thousands of postcards, in particular for Valentine's Day and other holidays, and she often wrote her own rhymes as well. Besides children, Edwardians were captivated by beautiful young women dressed to the nines with corseted waists, bustles, and big hair. The "Gibson Girl" created by Charles Dana Gibson launched the "pretty girl art" fad. Both Clare "Dwig" Dwiggins and Harrison Fisher produced their own posh Valentine postcards featuring so-called "pretty girls." Dwig also employed his pretty girls and Art Nouveau lettering for a "Fortune Teller" Valentine postcard series with secret messages in the drawings. For example, one of these has a message at the bottom: "Your fortune dear is in the moon. A looking glass will tell you soon." Written on the moon in backward script it also says, "You are worth your weight in gold." Other Valentine illustrators focused on animals and anthropomorphized animal characters, the most famous of these being Louis Wain, who was known for his obsession with cats. In this period, lovers were still familiar with floriography, or "The Language of Flowers," where in the color and type of flower depicted on a vintage Valentine postcard also telegraphed a coded message. Forget-me-nots were obviously popular flowers for Valentines. Daisies meant "pure love," dandelions expressed "happiness," and red roses were the ultimate symbol of "romantic love." Birds on Valentine postcards often had coded meanings as well. For example, because swallows mate for life, an image of a swallow would telegraph "everlasting love." Not every vintage Valentine postcard carries a loving sentiment, though. Continuing a tradition that began circa 1840 in England, postcard publishers mass-produced "Vinegar Valentines"—erroneously called "Penny Dreadfuls"—that featured an insulting cartoon likeness of a person and a four-line poem mocking them. The town drunk, a leering catcaller, a haughty shop girl, an off-key singer, a cruel boss, and a bad chef were all fair game for these insults sent anonymously. The Golden Age of Postcards gave Vinegar Valentines a second life, and they returned as postcards between World War I and World War II as well. When postcards were at their height of popularity—between 1907 and 1915—suffragists in the United States and Suffragettes in the United Kingdom were campaigning for women to gain the right to vote. Naturally, these first-wave feminist were the subject of much Vinegar Valentine postcard vitriol. However, the pro-suffrage movements produced their own Valentines, too, with much more positive messages. During to World War I, expensive embroidered silk postcards, sometimes decorated with forget-me-nots and messages of love, became popular with British soldiers missing their sweethearts back home. These are rare now, but even more rare are silk postcards that were specifically sewn with Valentine's Day greetings.