Accession No. RARE.2024.0080: Purchased, 2020 January
[identification of item], Pop-Up Christmas Cards, SPEC.RARE.MMS.0399, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University
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Processed by: David Mezick, 2024 December; Finding aid written by: David Mezick, 2024 December
Greeting cards are illustrated cards often with a pre-written message that are meant to be mailed. The illustration and message are usually related to a specific theme or day. Christmas cards are a type of greeting card.
The expansion of the postal system in England, and the introduction of penny postage in 1840, led to the increase of mailed correspondence. Before then, people paid to receive letters instead of to send them. Penny postage allowed people to send letters and cards anywhere in the country by using a penny stamp.
The first Christmas card was created in England in 1843. Greeting cards, including Christmas cards, became commercially available around 1860.
Samuel Kennedy Cowan was a poet from Northern Ireland. He was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1850, received his Master of Arts degree from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in 1874, and died in 1918. Cowan’s poetry was published in several collections, and he often wrote poems for Christmas cards. Many of his poems were set to music, including by Sir Arthur Sullivan.
The Pop-Up Christmas Cards, dated circa 1905-1910, contain three printed Christmas cards with images of women inside whose legs pop-up when the cards are opened. The images are of a woman dancing, a woman ice skating, and two women maids with a policeman. The cards each include a printed Christmas message on the outside and a short poem on the inside. Two of the cards have poems by Samuel Kennedy Cowan and the other card has a poem by Bertram Hope. Only one of the cards has handwriting on it, which reads “For Dad.”