Greeting Card History

Greeting card history begins about 200 years ago, people began the tradition of giving hand made cards to express congratulations or extend holiday greetings to family and friends.

The oldest known greeting card in existence is a Valentine made in the 1400s. When the world’s first postage stamp was issued in 1840 in the United Kingdom, cards became popular with the masses, thus making the Victorian era, the time when greeting cards became prolific.

The next big advance occurred in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole commissioned the artist John Calcott Horsley to paint a card for him to send at Christmas. Within the next ten years, sending cards became extremely popular in England.

For more than 30 years, greeting cards had to be imported to the United States. In 1875, however, the "Father of the American Christmas Card," Louis Prang, opened a lithographic shop in Boston, Massachusetts and published the first line of U.S. Christmas cards. Six years later his shop was producing more than five million cards a year.

Today, consumer research shows that more than 90 percent of the U.S. population sends greeting cards each year. Sending cards has become an American tradition for reaching out to others. Whether it is to celebrate, commiserate, or simply communicate, cards are one of the ways we show that we are thinking of others.