America’s First Christmas Cards (episode 316)

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Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Introduction to Christmas Cards

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 316, The First American Christmas Cards. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about Christmas cards. Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from? While the very first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made him popular in the United States and around the world. Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the 20th century. Thanks to his efforts and innovations, sending Christmas cards became a widespread and cherished holiday tradition. Or possibly a tedious obligation that you do because you have to. So the next time you’re picking out the perfect card, raise a glass of Christmas cheer for Mr. Louis Prang.

Jake:
[1:19] But before we talk about Louis Prang and his Christmas cards, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to all the listeners whose financial support makes it possible for me to keep on making Hub History. Creating a podcast doesn’t take as much money as producing professional video, but it’s also not free. And as some of you might remember, I haven’t had a full-time job in a few months, so I’ve been even more reliant on listener support than usual since leaving my last steady gig. We have a handful of supporters who give $10 or $20 a month to cover expenses, but there are many more who’ve been giving $2 or $5 a month for years, and that steady support adds up. Their ongoing support has kept the lights on for the podcast over these past few months, paying for our podcast media hosting, web hosting and security, transcription and AI, and everything that it takes to keep a podcast on the air. To everyone who’s already supporting the show, especially all those $2 sponsors, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory, or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

The Decline of Christmas Cards

Jake:
[2:40] Now it’s time for this week’s main topic.

Jake:
[2:45] Before Facebook, Christmas cards were the best way to keep in touch with old friends and acquaintances. He didn’t want to pick up the phone and call, but also didn’t want to completely lose contact with. With the rise of email and social media, Christmas card sales have been declining steadily since the dot-com revolution. But that only sped up an existing trend. One study that I saw says the average American family went from receiving 29 Christmas cards in 1984 to 20 in 2004. And that was before the full new media takeover was complete. However, even with a sales slump, between 1.3 and 1.6 billion with a B Christmas cards are sold in the United States annually. An article in the Vanderbilt Campus Paper from December 1964 lays the credit, or possibly the blame, for this phenomenon at the feet of Boston, and one Boston artist in particular. The whole Christmas card scheme can be traced to that breeding ground of bold ideas, Boston. Like his tea-dumping forebears a century before, printer Louis Prang didn’t quite know what he was starting when he made the first Christmas cards in 1875.

Jake:
[4:03] Now, the Vanderbilt hustler should probably have included one important adjective in that paragraph, as Louis Prang was only responsible for the first American Christmas cards in 1875. Across the pond, our British cousins had been sending Christmas cards for over 30 years by that time. In a 1937 article about the rise of the Christmas industrial complex for the journal Current History, Octavia Goodbar, which, great name by the way, Octavia Goodbar goes deeper, tracing the origins of the familiar Christmas card to the turn of the 18th century. The immediate predecessors of Christmas cards were the Christmas pieces, which date back to 1702 and the reign of Queen Anne in England. These were specimens of handwriting produced by children under the superintendence of the schoolmaster and were sent to relatives and friends to show what progress the pupils had made during the preceding year.

Jake:
[5:03] The Christmas card as we know it started to take shape in the mid-19th century. Credit for its creation is usually given to a frazzled public servant who just didn’t have enough hours in the day to write personalized Christmas letters to each and every Facebook friend. That public servant was also one of the founders of the UK’s Victoria and Albert Museum. In an article they published about early Christmas cards notes, Henry Cole was a prominent civil servant, educator, inventor, and the first director of the V&A. In the 1840s, he was instrumental in reforming the British postal system, helping to set up the Uniform Penny Post, which encouraged the sending of seasonal greetings on decorated letterheads and visiting cards. Christmas was a busy time in the Cole household, and with unanswered mail piling up, a time-saving solution was needed. Henry turned to his friend, artist John Calcutt Horsley to illustrate his idea. Cole’s diary entry for 17 December 1843 records, In the evening, Horsley came and brought his design for Christmas cards. Horsley’s design depicts three generations of the Cole family raising a toast in a central, hand-colored panel, surrounded by a decorative trellis and black-and-white scenes depicting acts of giving. The twofold message was of celebration and charity.

Jake:
[6:33] Cole then commissioned a printer to transfer the design onto cards, printing a thousand copies that could be personalized with a handwritten greeting. Horsley himself personalized his card to Cole by drawing a tiny self-portrait in the bottom right corner instead of his signature, along with a date, Xmas 1843.

Jake:
[6:54] Cole’s Christmas card was also published and offered for sale at a shilling apiece, which was expensive at the time, and the venture was judged a commercial flop. But the 1840s was a period of change, with Prince Albert introducing various German Christmas traditions to the British public, including the decorated Christmas tree. Henry Cole’s early Christmas cards started to catch on because they were a great time saver. But they didn’t bear much resemblance to the greeting cards that we know today. A blog post from the British Postal Museum describes those early cards and their evolution over the next few decades.

Jake:
[7:34] Early Christmas cards were expensive to produce. They were printed on one side only and were the size of a typical business card today. Many were printed in black and white or sepia and were hand-colored. Most were initially produced by Valentine’s card printers who were looking to expand, so many early Christmas cards often contained romantic images rather than religious ones. Things changed with the developments in printing processes in the 1860s. New, cheaper cards with different, more complex designs became available, and by the 1870s, the practice of sending Christmas cards had been firmly established as a British Christmas tradition.

The Rise of Louis Prang

Jake:
[8:16] The task of creating Christmas cards in the modern form that we’d all recognize would fall to an American, an immigrant named Louis Prang, who had transformed Christmas cards on both sides of the Atlantic. A few years ago, there was a biography of Boston painter John Singleton Copley that was titled A Revolution in Color. And a 1940 profile of Louis Prang by Edward Morrill in Hobbies magazine kind of implies that he brought a similar revolution to printing that Copley did to painting, writing, In America, the name of Louis Prang and color printing have become more or less synonymous.

Jake:
[8:56] From the time he first went to work, he was closely allied with color. Born in Prussia in 1824, the son of a factory owner, at the age of 13 he was apprenticed for five years at his father’s factory for dyeing and calico printing. At the termination of his apprenticeship, he went to Hagen in Westphalia to continue his studies in this technique. In 1848, his political activities made it necessary for him to flee his fatherland, to escape the wrath of the monarchical party who was victorious in the political revolt of that year.

Jake:
[9:31] That’s about the same time that some of my German ancestors on my mom’s side of the family came to this country. Back when legal immigration just meant showing up here and being white. Like my ancestors, the young Prang was considered German here in the States, but there wasn’t really a German nation at the time. After the Holy Roman Empire that was founded by Charlemagne broke up during the Napoleonic Wars, about 40 individual princedoms took its place until they were unified under Kaiser Wilhelm in the 1870s. The political activities that got young Louis banished from Prussia were part of the Revolutions of 1848, a series of political upheavals that swept across Europe from Sicily to France, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the princedoms of Germany. These revolutions were driven by a combination of factors, including nationalism, liberalism, and social unrest Nationalists sought to create independent nation-states, while liberals demanded constitutional reforms and representative government, Social unrest, fueled by economic inequality and poor working conditions, also motivated the masses to join the revolutions.

Jake:
[10:50] Although these revolutions initially seemed promising, they ultimately failed to achieve their goals. The revolution took different forms in different places, but in Prussia, soldiers fired on a protest march in Berlin, killing hundreds. While an elected assembly briefly provided some check to the king’s power, conservative forces, which were backed by powerful armies, were able to suppress the uprisings and restore traditional monarchies in Prussia and across most of Europe. Over time, these revolutions of 1848 would lead to the decline of absolute monarchies and to the rise of modern nationalism. But in the short term, many of the revolutionaries were forced to flee and take refuge abroad, with a large contingent of Germanic refugees settling in the United States, especially the upper Midwest.

Jake:
[11:42] In a 1911 profile of Louis Prang, Benjamin Fay Mills might have taken some slight artistic license and filling in the details of his subject’s revolutionary awakening and subsequent exile. He spent the first year in Vienna, the second in Paris, and the third in England and Scotland. He was in Manchester when the Republican awakening in France and Germany called to the embryonic democratic spirit within him and caused him to hasten back to the fatherland and join with the youth of his nation in the demand for republican reforms. He was the president of the Democratic Club at Hirschberg. and was early marked by the government as one of its enemies.

Jake:
[12:24] When his father besought him to give up his dangerous ideas, he drew a pistol, and, handing it to him, said, Father, you may take this pistol and kill me, but I must do this thing. It was not long before it was necessary for him to flee into exile to preserve his life, and he went to Bohemia, and later to Switzerland, waiting for the hour to strike for the emancipation of his native land. As there was no sign of change, he decided to emigrate to America, and in his case, the loss of one land became the gain of another, and the greater gain of the world. He climbed the side of the mountain which divided Austria and Germany, while his father and sisters toiled up the other side, and at the boundary line, bade him a tender farewell.

Prang’s Journey to America

Jake:
[13:16] Like I said, I’m not sure quite how accurate the details of that account are, but from an Austrian mountainside, Louis Prang found his way eventually to New York City, as Edward Morrill described in his 1940 profile. From 1848 to 1850, he was a political refugee, finding haven first in Austria, later in Prague, and finally in Zurich, Switzerland. Some three years earlier, he had met Rosa Gerber, a young Swiss girl of charm and beauty, on her way to the United States. And so, while in Prague, he proposed marriage to her by mail. When her acceptance arrived, also by mail, it was only natural that in Prang’s own words, I should follow my betrothed and try to build a home in the United States.

Jake:
[14:08] Accordingly, in 1850, he set sail for New York, arriving there on April 5th of that year. The hurry and bustle of the thriving and growing metropolis had little appeal to the young Prang. The activities of the town and the sordidness of its already existing slums and its harbor life were distasteful to him. Recalling that Boston was the center of the cotton and print manufacturing industry in America, after one week of unpleasant experience in New York, he came to the city of culture, as Boston was considered at that time. Boston pleased Prang from the first. Its location, its buildings, its curious winding streets, its educational institutions were all reminiscent of the country of his birth, and must in no little measure have helped soothe his natural nostalgia. Here, he wrote, I feel it my destiny to settle, and settle I did, for good.

Jake:
[15:09] Prang’s close association with color and printing continued after he settled in Boston, though he didn’t immediately join the lithographer’s trade. He spent time as a partner and a publisher of architecture books, then worked for a manufacturer of jewelry cases and leatherwork, a freelance wood engraver, and even working under Frank Leslie at Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine. Which we feature artwork from in the show notes fairly often. Finally, Morrill wrote, In 1856 came the turning point in his career. He entered into a third partnership, this time with Julius Mayer, a lithographic printer with whom he had struck up an acquaintance. Mayer wished to start a lithographic establishment with Prang as the business manager and artist. It soon developed that his duties were to include also those of the office boy, delivery boy, salesman, and general factotum around the shop. Their first color print was of a simple bouquet of roses to be inserted as an illustration in the lady’s companion for 1857.

Innovations in Lithography

Jake:
[16:17] Backing up a step, lithography is a printing process that was developed in Bavaria in the late 18th century. It uses a flat stone or sometimes metal plate to create an image. An artist draws an image on the stone with a greasy crayon or ink. The plate’s treated with a chemical solution that etches away the areas of the plate that are not covered by the drawing. This leaves the image slightly raised on the plate. The plate’s then inked and the image is transferred to paper. Allowing an artist to create nearly unlimited quick copies of finely detailed images. While lithography was well-established by the time Prang and Mayer got into the business, the addition of color was still brand new, with the first commercially viable process being developed in Europe in the 1850s. In a 2014 review of 19th century American lithography, Georgia Barnhill describes the state of the art at the time that Prang got into the color lithograph business.

Jake:
[17:20] How were colored lithographs produced? Until the widespread use of mechanical color lithographic printing processes after 1860, print publishers hired women and men to apply color using watercolors and brushes. The Endicott brothers, for example, called on their sisters from time to time to help with hand coloring. An article on The Map Colorer in Yankee Doodle, a popular magazine of 1846, discussed the work of map and print colorists in New York. The author suggested that about 200 girls were employed in coloring prints. Based on what we know about the practices of Nathaniel Currier and Currier and Ives, production was organized so that the prints passed along an assembly line, and each employee applied a single tint. Inexpensive prints often only had only one or two colors.

Jake:
[18:16] Beginning in the early 1840s, lithographers began to use mechanical means to reproduce color. William Sharp trained in England, settled in Boston in 1839, and produced the first American lithograph printed in color, a portrait of F.W.P. Greenwood. Such early color lithographs featured three or four different colors. The portrait of Greenwood is delicate in its coloring. In Philadelphia, Peter S. Duval experimented with lithotents, in which areas of color were created by washes applied to separate stones. In this way, backgrounds, such as skies and landscape views, could be printed in color, rather than having a colorist do the work. Hand coloring could then be applied for minute details.

Prang’s Business Challenges

Jake:
[19:11] In 1860, Louis Prang bought out his partner and continued in business as Prang & Company, but his timing was almost disastrous. After secessionists fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, trade with the southern states was halted for the duration of their insurrection, and much of Prang’s business had been with the South. However, the resulting war brought new opportunities that the printer seized upon, as related than Morrill’s profile.

Jake:
[19:44] The Civil War was a blessing in disguise to the Prang Company. Its imminence had put a stop to all business. And of course, as soon as hostilities began, collections below the Mason and Dixon line would be impossible. However, on the evening of the very first day on which the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, Prang’s luck turned for good. A neighboring engineer brought up to him a map of Charleston Harbor, the locale of the first engagement of the war, and suggested that it be reproduced. The newspapers of that time did not use illustrations, and so the field was still open for lithographic printers to step in. Prang did just that. The next morning, a copy was off the press, and within a few hours, the first copies were on the street. The newsboys soon found their way to the modest lithographic establishment in Tremont Row, and tramp, tramp, tramp, the four flights up and down could be heard from morning until night. Within a short time, the shot became a humming hive of activity. These maps were closely followed by a series of six campaign sketches by a little-known American artist by the name Winslow Homer, and a series of 24 humorous sketches from the same pen.

Jake:
[21:03] By this time, Prang was probably using a technique where the artist would sketch on paper, and then the image would be transferred onto the stone, rather than having the artist draw on the stone directly. This development would be followed quickly by a dramatic improvement in color reproduction, with Barnhill’s article noting, Immigrant Louis Prang learned color textile printing in his native Germany.

The Birth of Christmas Card Designs

Jake:
[21:28] Several years after his arrival in Boston in 1850, he joined forces with Julius Mayer, with whom he began printing labels in color for a variety of companies. They also produced business cards, scenic views, and posters. After further training in Europe, Prang developed an important specialty in the late 1860s, reproducing paintings using up to 30 stones per image. Distributed on paper embossed to resemble canvas, and framed in walnut frames, the prints, in fact, could be mistaken for oil paintings on canvas.

Jake:
[22:07] Louis Prang made a trip to his native Germany in 1864, where one assumes that either all was forgiven, or his role in the March Revolution 16 years before had been forgotten. While he was there, he studied the latest European developments in color lithography, returning home with the knowledge he needed to not only replicate, but improve upon these new techniques, as Morrill described in Hobbes magazine. Chromolithography, as it was called by Prang, was the process by which printing in colors could be done direct from the stone. The lithographic artist traces the outline in all detail on a transparent shape.

Jake:
[22:51] The lithographic artist traces the outline in all detail on a transparent sheet of gelatine. This outline is then transferred to the stone. The artist’s next step is to analyze or break down the painting into its various tints and shades, and to determine the necessary colors to be used on the various stones to create a facsimile. After the first color plate has been finished, it’s put into the proof press where an impression is taken. This serves as a guide for the succeeding plate. When the second plate has been prepared, another proof is taken on plain paper, and then a second proof on the sheet already printed from the first plate, and so on, until each color has been printed and the work completed. In order that the superimposing of plates on the paper be exact, the sheet is trimmed absolutely square, right down to the plate edge, and then guide marks are scored on each of the four sides. This enables the printer to make an exact superimposition and prevents any possibility of blurring, which occurred on cheaper prints. There is still one more process, and that’s to grain the paper to give it the appearance of the original canvas on which the picture itself was painted.

Jake:
[24:09] By this time, Prank had an office and design studio on Tremont Row, where most of Boston’s newspapers were headquartered, as well as a showroom on Washington Street in the Theater District, and a branch office on East 50th Street in Manhattan. To make the most of this new chromolithography business, he established a factory for producing chromolithographs at 286 Roxbury Street, on the corner of Gardner Street. Today, it’s right behind the campus of the Roxbury Community College. Prine already had the ability to print detailed maps and nuanced sketches by Winslow Homer, and now he could create nearly flawless reproductions of full-color paintings. Starting in 1875, he’d put these talents to work on creating Christmas cards for the American market, and Morrill’s profile explains how the concept of the Christmas card crossed the Atlantic. Mrs. Ackerman, the wife of Mr. Prang’s London representative, sent over in the 1870s the suggestion that on the trade cards and announcements, the name and address of the firm be omitted and replaced by inserting words of greeting for such seasonal celebrations and occasions as Christmas and Easter.

Jake:
[25:25] The idea was immediately developed, and in 1874, a new line of Christmas cards was sent over to England to be tested in the English market. It was so profitable a venture that in 1875, the same line, with additions, was put on the market in this country.

Prang’s Design Competitions

Jake:
[25:44] The business of selling Christmas cards soon became such an important branch of the firm’s output that by 1880, Prang conceived the idea of holding the world’s first competition for Christmas card designs. It was held in the spring of 1880. In a 1978 article tracing the history of Christmas greetings for the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Walter Ristoff notes, Early Prang Christmas cards featured flowers, birds, landscapes, attractive young ladies, and even dancing girls. Nativity scenes, wise men, camels, stars, mistletoe, holly, and ivy were introduced somewhat later as Christmas card illustrations. In the search for seasonal and saleable Christmas card designs, Prang would look outside the company after the first few years, holding a design contest in 1880 that would continue for the next several years.

Jake:
[26:42] The May 9th New York Tribune reported on the first of these contests.

Jake:
[26:48] Mr. R. E. Moore, the proprietor of the American Art Gallery, No. 6, East 23rd Street, Madison Square, publishes a circular which may be had on application, announcing the terms of a competition that’s sure to awaken a lively interest among the devotees of decorative art. In this circular, we’re informed that Mr. Louis Prang, the lithographer and publisher of many excellent books relating to the arts, has placed in Mr. Moore’s hands the generous sum of $2,000 to be distributed in prizes for four original designs to be reproduced as Christmas cards.

Jake:
[27:28] For the best original design, the prize offered is $1,000, while for the second best, third best, and fourth best, $500, $300, and $200 will be given respectively. The prizes will be awarded by Samuel Coleman, Richard Hunt, and E.C. Moore at the close of a competitive exhibition to be held in this city at the American Art Gallery from June 1st to June 5th. We have no doubt the competition will bring out a great deal of talent and that many pretty pictures will be the result of the friendly contest. The trade in Christmas cards is now grown to be very large, And while our home manufacturers, Mr. Prang, chief among them, have done a good deal to destroy the competition of the English market by the cleverness of their designs, yet it is still from England that the best material is derived.

Jake:
[28:24] Encouraged by the success he has himself met with in his attempts to supply the home market, Mr. Prang has now made a move which can hardly fail to add American Christmas cards to the list of things in which we beat our English cousins out of sight. Just as, in the future, all the English high-cast babies who are born with silver spoons in their mouths will read the name of Tiffany & Co. On the handles, so all the Christmas cards that are sent by the baby’s family friends in congratulation will bear the stamp of Moore and Prang, and will add to the nursery list of English birds and flowers the American equivalents for larks and nightingales, daisies and cornflowers. In a 1956 book about the history of greeting cards, Ernest Dudley Chase reviewed some of the famous artists who entered, and sometimes won, Prang’s card contests through the years.

Jake:
[29:19] Turning his attention to cards, he determined to procure the very best in art as a basis upon which to build. With this in view, he inaugurated prize contests on a scale never before attempted. Without going into the details of several very successful competitions, it may be of interest to know that one year, Dora Wheeler was awarded a first prize of $2,000, and that on another occasion Elihu Vetter won $1,000 for a design. The writer is informed that this design may be seen at the head of the stairway in the Congressional Library of Washington, D.C.

Jake:
[29:57] Competitions of this kind were open to all, and the very generous amounts offered and the number of prizes led such men as Elihu Vetter, Douglas Folk, St. John Harper, Peter Moran, Thomas Moran, J. Alden Weir, Will H. Lowe, James G. Tyler, and many others to compete. The drawings submitted in the contests were exhibited in the Reichard’s Gallery in New York, and although a competent board of judges first passed on them, the public were later admitted and allowed to add their votes in the awarding of prizes. Many designs and drawings, which were not prize winners, were bought for publication purposes, and the competitions were considered of great value in securing not only the best in art, but also a great variety of subjects and styles. Hundreds of cards might be described in detail with all the adjectives in the dictionary, and yet give but a faint idea of the charm of design, the wide scope of subjects, and the care with which each was reproduced in full color. Many carried designs of a decorative nature on the reverse side, something that is not attempted on present-day cards.

The Popularity of Prang’s Cards

Jake:
[31:14] By the early 1880s, the Christmas card fad was firmly established in the United States, and Louis Prang’s cards were quickly becoming the standard against which all others would be judged. In the pages of Chicago’s Inner Ocean newspaper on December 10, 1881, Elisha Vedder’s card contest win is noted, as is the growing dominance of Prang’s cards in the Midwest and beyond. The beautiful Christmas cards have come to be as much a part of the festal season as Santa Claus and the Christmas tree. They bear greetings of love and remembrance to absent friends and keep the memories green that might otherwise die out in the years of absence. No others have done so much to encourage this graceful courtesy and cultivate the artistic tastes of the masses of the people as Louis L. Prang and Company. They spare neither pains nor expense in securing the best designs and the finest workmanship in the manufacture of these beautiful mementos. They have this year repeated the experiment of last year in offering large prizes for the best designs. These were exhibited at the American Art Gallery in New York. The first prize of $1,000 was awarded by artists and critics to Mr. Elisha Vedder. I don’t know.

Jake:
[32:40] The appeal of Prang’s Christmas cards wasn’t limited to the UK and the US, either. Pretty soon, they’d reached around the world. By the following year, 1882, Prang’s cards had arrived in Launceston, in Tasmania, which is just about as far from Prang’s Roxbury factory as you can get. This article from their local newspaper, The Examiner, of Thursday, December 14th, indicates that these cards were still fairly new there, but they were sought after, and they were on their way to becoming the go-to choice for discerning Tasmanians.

Jake:
[33:19] The fashion of sending these pleasing tokens of love and friendship, which was unknown a few years ago, has assumed such dimensions, and has proved so popular that it has ceased to be a fashion only, and has become a firmly established custom throughout the civilized world. In the production of these cards, it has been the earnest endeavor of Prang and company to steadily improve their style and character, and thereby to elevate, if possible, the innate love for the truly beautiful in art and the thousands of homes into which these messengers of goodwill find their way. The successful designs this year are extremely beautiful, both in conception and execution, and some of them will doubtless find an honored resting place on many a cottage wall.

Global Expansion of Prang’s Cards

Jake:
[34:08] We have seen specimens of these new cards that were forwarded by Mr. P.E. Reynolds, a wholesale agent in Melbourne, but they may now be had of all the local dealers.

Jake:
[34:21] With his company’s newly global reach, it would have been easy for Louis Prang to forget about his own neighborhood. But a brief blurb in the December 31, 1882 Boston Globe makes it clear that he was still Jenny from the Block.

Jake:
[34:37] Each Christmas, for many years, it has been the custom of Mr. Louis Prang to present the officers of Division 10 with a large number of beautiful Christmas cards. In recognition of his kind consideration, the officers connected with the above division presented him last evening with a fine ebony, gold-headed, and gold-mounted cane. The gift was sent to Mr. Prang, accompanied by the following letter. Dear Sir, At a meeting held in this house on Christmas, it was voted that the thanks of all the members of this station be conveyed to you for the beautiful Christmas presents which it has been our great pleasure to receive. Not only this year, but in years previous. It was also voted that a suitable cane be procured and presented to you as a slight expression of our thanks for this and the many other acts of kindness which we have received from you. Accept it, sir, not for its value. With it comes the best of wishes of all the givers. And in after years, when obliged to be a support for your failing strength, may you have the pleasant recollection of knowing that, during your life, you had done all in your power to cheer the fireside of many of your fellow men.

Jake:
[35:54] Respectfully yours, on behalf of the members of Division 10, Charles C.J. Spear, Lieutenant.

Jake:
[36:02] If my quick Google search is accurate, Division 10 was located about a block from the Prang and Company factory in Roxbury. So Lewis had not forgotten his roots.

The Importance of Card Text

Jake:
[36:15] Louis Prang’s advancements in the Christmas card industry weren’t limited to choosing excellent artwork or developing a near-perfect method of reproducing them. Morel’s 1940 profile makes it clear that the text that accompanied the artwork also mattered to him, and his company put nearly as much effort into finding good writers as they did top artists. The publisher was not satisfied with the usual sentiments and more or less banal remarks printed on the cards of his competitors. He felt that a fine card deserved a well-written verse or thought. And for that reason, he bought original verses from such popular and famous writers as Celia Thaxter and Mrs. Emily Shaw Foreman. This was a revolutionary attitude to take in those days.

Jake:
[37:04] With his success growing, Walter Ristov’s 1978 article notes that Prang added Easter greetings to his card line in 1879, and Valentine’s in 1887. With a full line of holiday cards in a global reach, Louis Prang and his company were soon the most sought-after printers in the world, and Ernest Dudley Chase argued that his designs were worth the higher cost.

Prang’s Legacy in Card Design

Jake:
[37:32] Prices were higher for the American cards than those of foreign design, but the expense of making them in the Prang method, by which they were printed in not less than eight colors, and sometimes running to as many as 20 colors to obtain delicate effects, was far greater. His cards had an individual charm, not merely in design, but in technique, lettering, stock used, and their almost perfect coloring. The designs were always daintily finished without trifling detail, and the borders and decorative treatments were never vulgar, but artistic in every sense of the word. In general, the designs were more Christmassy than English cards.

Jake:
[38:17] In that same profile, Ernest Dudley Chase quotes an 1894 article from English critic Gleason White, whose country had invented the Christmas card to demonstrate that this immigrant craftsman from Roxbury had become the global leader in Christmas card printing, and his cards were the most sought after in the world. The publications of Messer’s Prang of Boston cannot be ignored. Both for their intrinsic merits and the influence they had upon English taste, it is not easy, even now that their novelty is faded, to speak of them except in superlatives. For, with all due respect to our English makers, it is doubtful if any designs this side of the Atlantic were better printed. Indeed, it would be a somewhat difficult task to find a dozen examples published in England that could be set forward as worthy rivals to the best dozen of the Boston cards.

Jake:
[39:16] The charm of the coloring is not to be attributed entirely to the larger number of color printings, or superior chromolithography. Both these factors no doubt help to give the peculiarly harmonious result, but one can feel beyond this, that the artists employed recognized from the first the limitation of all mechanical reproduction, however perfectly manipulated, and designed accordingly. Without championing the ideal of the prang cards, which were often as un-Christmas-like in their subjects as most English cards, without claiming that their designs show in themselves more academic knowledge, more invention, or more graceful composition than our own, Yet, when you hunt for hours among the English sample books and unwittingly open a volume of these American cards, the chances are that it asserts itself as distinctly more charming than the previous book, no matter whose you had chanced to be studying immediately before. It is painful to have to own up to so much, but unfortunately, the conclusion is forced upon anyone who explores the vast stores of cards for the purpose of discovering intrinsic beauty in the art set forth thereupon.

The End of an Era

Jake:
[40:32] Louis Prang retired from the chromolithography business on October 31, 1899. The next month, he auctioned off his private collection of over 3,000 original paintings and drawings from around the world, most of which he had purchased from the artist directly in order to offer reproductions for sale. He died of pneumonia in June 1909 while visiting his vacation home in Los Angeles.

Jake:
[40:59] To learn more about Louis Prang and the first American Christmas cards, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 316. I’ll have links to a few collections of Prang’s cards, along with his war map of Charleston, South Carolina, and some of his other colorful chromolithographs, so you can see what all the hubbub’s about. I’ll link to all the newspaper articles I quoted from, including Prang’s obituary in the L.A. Herald. I’ll also link to the profiles I used from Benjamin Faye Mills, Edward Morrill, Ernest Dudley Chase, Octavia Goodbar, Georgia Barnhill, and Walter Ristoff. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. We’re Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Mastodon. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to try and post like I did back when social media was fun. But instead of doing it mostly on Twitter, I’m going to mostly post on Blue Sky.

Jake:
[42:07] If you’re not following me there, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.