I have been going through a cigar box of collected calling cards from my great grandmother and I am astonished by the variety of pretty designs combined with the elegant scripts. It just seems such a lovely convention and I am rather sorry we don’t do it anymore. Now we hand out “business cards” which have every conceivable method of contacting us crammed on the card — and while it’s true the designs can be quiet striking — their function is so different than these beauties, which was simply to announce or memorialize one’s visit. That my great grandmother gathered them together and stored them says something too about her visual delight in keeping them, not just as mementos but small slips of domestic art. I love too that they were used equally by both men and women.
So I thought I would share them with you and have created a little gallery of all the cards which you can find here — or in the right hand column for future reference. Seeing them all together really makes me want to design a few for myself — and to hell with the clever, efficient business card!
Here are some of my favorites (though I confess to being besotted by all of them):
The last calling card is especially unique as it is made from a small rectangle of birch bark inscribed with the visitor’s name — A. G. Robinson.
You can view other terrific collections online, such as the accumulated calling cards of the Washburn Family of Camps Mills, Town of Hounsfield, Jefferson County, New York, or read about the etiquette of using the cards on the Jane Austen website, or rather wistfully have a look at this gorgeous antique silver calling card case.
In the comments below, Mark wondered about the cards also using the language of flowers to send a more subtle message. Yes, of course as it turns out! There are quite few posters which help to reveal some of the more subtle meanings on the card.
And this one from a paying site –so excuse the watermark — but the bunches of different flowers seemed to more closely resemble the calling cards.
Is there anyone left out there that still creates things like this? Our luck, they probably do but, because they are not mass-produced by the (minimum order of) thousands, they’ll cost you an arm and a let to get something so customized.
I love them all! Have always wondered what a calling card looked like, thank you so much for sharing your great grandmother’s treasures!
Cheers from the land down under,
Mo
Those are so beautiful 🙂
To the above poster, one may easily find many calling-card makers these days, and they don’t cost that much. Custom works for instance, available on Etsy:
http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_type=tag_title&search_query=calling+cards
I guess you could even design your own card and get it printed at places like vistaprint. I did a custom business card it only cost me around 20 euros, and I even got silver accents done 🙂
Thanks for the info Lisa — I suspect the real cost in making a lovely calling card would be in the colored inks — most of these cards are so lavish with color! Yet that’s what makes them so beautiful.
i’m getting some!
Those are terrific. I definitely think that one of the sad things about our modern world is the passing of some of these old, wonderful, PERSONAL conventions. I can honestly say until right now I had heard of a ‘calling card’ but had no idea what one really was. So thanks for educating me! 🙂
I think it is sad that letter writing has gone by the wayside in so many people’s lives. One of the things we try to do in our family is make sure the sent ‘thank you’ note isn’t dying, but most of the people we know are not like that at all. While an in person ‘thank you’ is wonderful, I think the art of the written ‘thank you’ is one that shouldn’t die.
Do you know the years these were used? I am trying to find information on calling cards used during the civil war era
Hi Carrie: As these belonged to my Great grandmother, I would say they were later than the Civil War — maybe closer to 1890’s. I’ll see if I can find any dates among the cards, though I don’t remember seeing any.
Hi Midori,
I am seeing particular combinations of flowers on some of the personal calling cards, and am sadly not proficient enough in botany to identify the flowers. Would people leaving these calling cards have meant a particular message in the depicted flowers, and been using the 19th-century “language of flowers”?
Hi Mark — a great question indeed! I had not thought about that (though how to interpret A.G. Robinson’s card created from a slice of birch bark? Intriguing!) though I suspect that there most likely wasn’t a specific attachment to the flowers — these were commercially made which might have picked pretty images rather than meaningful ones –on the other hand, since you mentioned it, I can’t stop thinking about it either. Let me do some research on both the calling card and the language of flowers!
Thanks, Midori! Please keep me posted on what you find. I thought of it because I thought of reviving the custom of calling cards, having been charmed by how lovely some of these images look, but I wouldn’t want to convey some unintended message by using them. Maybe that’s just my overthinking, since I doubt many people these days would know the language of flowers. A book I read several years ago, “The Gardens of Emily Dickinson”, had wonderful insights on the language of flowers and Dickinson’s use of it in her gardens, her relationships with other people, and her poems.
Wow, you altered the whole post! Thanks!