
A Token of My Affection
Greeting Cards and American Business Culture
Barry Shank(Author)
Columbia University Press
Will be published approx. on 4. July 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
368 pages
978-0-231-11879-8 (ISBN)
Description
Each year in the United States, millions of mass-produced greeting cards proclaim their occasional messages: "For My Loving Daughter," "On the Occasion of Your Marriage," and "It's a Boy!" For more than 150 years, greeting cards have tapped into and organized a shared language of love, affection, and kinship, becoming an integral part of American life and culture. Contemporary incarnations of these emotional transactions performed through small bits of decorated paper are often dismissed as vacuous cliches employing worn-out stereotypes. Nevertheless, the relationship of greeting cards to systems of material production is well worth studying and understanding, for the modern greeting card is the product of an industry whose values and aims seem to contradict the sentiments that most cards express. In fact, greeting cards articulate shifting forms of love and affiliation experienced by people whose lives have been shaped by the major economic changes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A Token of My Affection shows in fascinating detail how the evolution of the greeting card reveals the fundamental power of economic organization to enable and constrain experiences of longing, status, desire, social connectedness, and love and to structure and partially determine the most private, internal, and intimate of feelings. Beautifully illustrated, A Token of My Affection follows the development of the modern greeting card industry from the 1840s, as a way of recovering that most elusive of things-the emotional subjectivity of another age. Barry Shank charts the evolution of the greeting card from an afterthought to a traditional printing and stationery business in the mid-nineteenth century to a multibillion-dollar industry a hundred years later. He explains what an industry devoted to emotional sincerity means for the lives of all Americans. Blending archival research in business history with a study of surviving artifacts and a literary analysis of a broad range of relevant texts and primary sources, Shank demonstrates the power of business to affect love and the ability of love to find its way in the marketplace of consumer society.
A Token of My Affection shows in fascinating detail how the evolution of the greeting card reveals the fundamental power of economic organization to enable and constrain experiences of longing, status, desire, social connectedness, and love and to structure and partially determine the most private, internal, and intimate of feelings. Beautifully illustrated, A Token of My Affection follows the development of the modern greeting card industry from the 1840s, as a way of recovering that most elusive of things-the emotional subjectivity of another age. Barry Shank charts the evolution of the greeting card from an afterthought to a traditional printing and stationery business in the mid-nineteenth century to a multibillion-dollar industry a hundred years later. He explains what an industry devoted to emotional sincerity means for the lives of all Americans. Blending archival research in business history with a study of surviving artifacts and a literary analysis of a broad range of relevant texts and primary sources, Shank demonstrates the power of business to affect love and the ability of love to find its way in the marketplace of consumer society.
Reviews / Votes
This volume will be a useful addition to marketing and social sciences collections... Recommended Choice An intellectually rich, deeply researched history of mass-produced consumer good whose success depends on its ability to connect people emotionally. -- David Farber Enterprise & Society A carefully detailed history... An interesting read. Antiques & The Arts Weekly This well-written and nicely illustrated book illuminates how the imagery in greeting cards has reflected overt and covert classist assumptions. -- Cele C. Otnes Journal of American History A carefully detailed history. Antiques and the Arts Weekly A Token of My Affection is an important work of American studies and contributes much to business history. -- Catherine Gudis American Studies A beautifully illustrated, painstakingly researched book... [a] smart, ambitious, innovative study. -- Lori Merish American Historial ReviewMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
85 photos
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
440 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-231-11879-8 (9780231118798)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
11/2015
1st Edition
De Gruyter
€29.95
Available for download

Book
09/2004
Columbia University Press
€144.84
Article not available at the moment
Person
Barry Shank is professor of comparative studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. His work on popular culture has appeared in such journals as boundary 2, Radical History Review, American Studies, and American Quarterly.
Content
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Structured Feelings amid Circulations of the Heart 1. Vicious Sentiments: Nineteenth-Century Valentines and the Sentimental Production of Class Boundaries 2. The Nineteenth-Century Christmas Card: The Chromo-Reproduction of Sentimental Value 3. Corporate Sentiment: The Rise of the Twentieth-Century Greeting Card Industry and the American Culture of Business 4. Condensation, Displacement, and Masquerade: The Dream-Work of Greeting Cards 5. Knitting the Social Lace: The Use of Greeting Cards 6. All This Senseless Rationality: Beyond the End of the Modern Era of Greeting Cards Notes Bibliography Index