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Visual Materials

Subseries B. Holidays, celebrations, and commemorations


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    Ball and dance party ephemera, by holiday and event

    Visual Materials

    Binder includes Valentine's Day, Leap Year, and other ball and dance party tickets, invitations and programs.

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    Ball and dance party ephemera, by holiday and event

    Visual Materials

    Binder includes Valentine's Day, Leap Year, and other ball and dance party tickets, invitations and programs.

    priRosin

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    Series II. Manners and customs

    Visual Materials

    The Manners and customs series includes albums, correspondence, greeting cards, visiting cards, and other ephemera relating to friendship, holidays, celebrations, commemorations, and love and courtship. Items include prints and drawings, signed friendship albums, holiday scrap, escort cards, guides on flirtation and wedding memorabilia.

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    Subseries A. Greeting cards

    Visual Materials

    The subseries contains greeting cards created for Valentine's Day. Included are handmade cards with theorem painting, paper cut work (Scherenschnitte), rebus puzzles, frakturs, puzzle purses, endless knots, pinpricking, and other folk art methods. Also included are greeting cards created during the Victorian era by English and American stationers, makers, and distributors such as Joseph Addenbrooke, Dobbs and Co., Thomas De La Rue, Esther Howland, Jonathan King, Joseph Mansell, and George C. Whitney which demonstrate various methods of design and production, often on intricate paper lace with embossing, scrap assemblage, and other illustrative and printing techniques. This subseries also contains comic or "vinegar valentines" created by publishers McLoughlin Bros. and Raphael Tuck & Sons, and printers A. Park, A.J. Fisher, Marks & Sons, and Thomas W. Strong. Many of the comic valentines are illustrated by Charles Howard who worked for the various publishers. Of note are dimensional and mechanical valentines, which either have mechanical levers, honeycomb tissue paper, paper wheels, or pulls to hold the cards up or move in different directions.

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    Subseries B. Louis Prang

    Visual Materials

    This subseries contains promotional, instructional and internal files relating to Louis Prang. Included are art course books, trade cards, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and correspondence. Louis Prang's Valentine's Day cards are housed in the Valentine's Day series, and his other holiday greeting cards are found in the Manners and customs series.

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    Holiday stationery

    Visual Materials

    The Nancy and Henry Rosin collection of valentine, friendship, and devotional ephemera contains materials from Europe and North America dating from 1493 to the late 2010s. The bulk of the collection consists of greeting cards exchanged on Valentine’s Day, dating from approximately 1840 to 1930. Early handcrafted valentine cards found within the greeting cards subseries demonstrate folk art methods of pinpricking, paper cutting, paper folding, painting, puzzle making, and illustration. Other cards dating from the Victorian era include comic or “vinegar” valentines, paper lace valentines, cobweb valentines, and cards created by various printing, embossing, and assemblage techniques. Many of the late 19th-century cards are dimensional and mechanical paper constructions, made with a combination of die-cut scraps, honeycomb tissue paper, and levers, strings, or wheels that enable the cards to pop-up or move. Also included in the collection are greeting cards exchanged for other holidays and events, friendship cards dating from the Biedermeier era, friendship albums with locks of hair, language of flowers almanacs and booklets, matrimonial documents, sachets, verse writers, religious devotional items, mourning cards, scrapbook albums, and correspondence relating to love and courtship. The collection also contains artifacts and three-dimensional items such as fans, jewelry boxes, shadow boxes, and additional items, some of which include fragile, glass components. Smaller portions of the collection include educational ephemera, such as rewards of merit and bookmarks, and American Civil War ephemera, such as greeting cards and song sheets. Additional materials include artist and organizational files relating to illustrator Catherine “Kate” Greenaway, printer Louis Prang, and 20th-century greeting card companies Rust Craft and Norcross. The last series of this collection contains research materials compiled by valentine scholar Charles Albert Reed and by Nancy Rosin. The materials consist largely of secondary sources, notes, and newspaper clippings.

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