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cardsharp
An Historical
Perspective Cardsharp is only stating the bleeding obvious, when he observes the current Covid-19 crisis has obviously paralysed our industry, like many others. With greeting card shops forced to temporarily close their doors, the greeting card industry faces a challenge like no other in its history. Or does it? In fact, Cardsharp notes the industry has gone through many crisis in its 180 year history, and yet has always emerged the other end.
While everyone is understandably reeling from the unprecedented upheaval and hardship (psychological and financial), Cardsharp tries to find some solace in history that everything will be alright soon. He recalls how there was controversy right from the start of this great industry, when Sir Henry Cole launched the first 1,000 of what were then the first ever commercial Christmas cards back in 1842. The design itself featured a family celebrating with glasses of red wine, but shockingly for many, these were being drunk by the children as well as adult members of the groups. The Muggletonians (one of the temperance groups of the time) and many other religious followers were outraged and protested against and destroyed some of these ‘new fangled’ festive greetings, but eventually this outrage subsided and Henry Cole, and his later imitators, moved on to safer subject matter like robins and wintery scenes. In fact, despite what the Daily Mail’s hysterical December headlines would have you to believe, Christmas cards in the Victorian era were never much on a religious theme then.
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
Flowers, fairies, Santa Claus and elves dominated. Amazingly, in the 1880s, one manufacturer produced over five million cards a year - a number few modern publishers would ever dream of reaching. But then the emerging greeting card industry was dealt another near-death blow. Suddenly there was a huge surge in popularity of cheap postcards, many of them printed by a now famous historical company, Raphael Tuck, and these could very well have spelt the end of the beautiful and elaborate Victorian style greeting card. That could have been it for the humble greeting card. We could all have been sending postcards to each other, like our continental counterparts for the whole of the 20th century, if assistance had not come from two very unlikely sources. Firstly, across the Atlantic, some 70 years after Sir Henry Cole, the eminent philanthropist and public servant who created the commercial Christmas card, two young entrepreneurs of very lowly contrasting backgrounds were building the first American greeting card empires. Irving Stone of American Greetings and Joyce Hall of Hallmark were both doing their best to establish the
Above: Henry Cole launched the first ever Christmas card in 1842. Bottom: The 'Banana Wars' in 1999 threatened the UK greeting card economy.
greeting card habit with spectacular results. Phew, but there was more to come. The horrible devastating tragedy of the First World War, ironically helped reestablish greeting cards on this side of the water. As millions of US troops were posted to Europe in 1918, their families sent Hallmark and American Greetings’ cards in their hundreds of thousands across the Atlantic for Christmas and birthdays. And the craze soon became spread to British families, who had their loved ones stationed on the Western Front, so much so that in 1919, a year after the armistice, the UK greeting card manufacturers formed the Greeting Card and Calendar Association. The ultimate and tragic irony given our current situation, is that this was also the year of the so-called Spanish flu epidemic, which killed globally up to 50 million people. More than the number that died in the whole four years of the Great War. With the greeting card sending habit firmly re-established, the UK card industry managed to survive the rigours of the 1920 and 1930s, including the Wall Street Crash