Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Trimmings May Differ but the Message is the Same

I recently had the opportunity to thumb through a local family’s scrap book of vintage cards. Each celebration had been lovingly preserved; from birthday greetings, to Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas. I noticed immediately that although visually these cards differed from the ones that grace the shelves of our local retailers, their messages were the same.

Upon examination, there are several differences in the vintage cards when compared to modern ones. In size, the vintage cards tend to be quite a bit smaller. In shape, they are less uniform than the cards that we see today. In adornment, they are decorated with bits of foil, ribbon and cellophane or plastic for windows. In cost, most were under 25 cents each. It is also obvious that the production process of the cards was very different from the today’s mass produced offerings.



Many of the cards that date pre-1950s were produced using a technique called lithography. Lithography uses simple chemical processes to create an image using a method similar to rubber stamping. First, an image is produced by etching it onto a flat surface, and then the etched surface is copied by applying ink, or the equivalent, to it. Finally, another material, like paper, was pressed against the etched plate. Early etchings were done in limestone. By the mid 1800s the limestone was replaced by metal plates. Lithography was used to produce posters, maps, books, newspapers, and cards.


As a collector of vintage cards, these cards were a reminder to me of the role that the printing houses played in settling the Canadian west – you can’t say that about the cards of today! “The first recorded lithograph produced in British North America was the work of Johns Adams on the Royal Engineers Press at Quebec in 1824. The Royal Engineers also had a press at Fredericton only a small number of prints and maps seemed to have been produced”. (History of the Book in Canada: Beginnings to 1840, University of Toronto press, 2004).

With a railway in place and individual homestead plots surveyed, the western landscape was in need of settlers. The government passed the Homestead Act in parliament and then initiated the greatest advertising campaign ever launched on Canadian soil. The medium . . . lithograph posters. In 1896, on the eve of the federal government’s full-scale advertising bombardment, 17,000 immigrants had arrived in Canada. Just three years later, when the program was in full swing, the figure almost tripled to 45,000, and by 1905, it tripled again. In all, two million people arrived in Canada in the period from 1896 to the First World War and by 1911; the Canadian west had been transformed.

Thank you FH for sharing your family scrap book with me. The history contained in the pages of your book extends far beyond the cards that it holds.

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