Vintage Valentines

From January's Vintage Paper Faire: 

Portraits from the Past

It's that time of year again, and the Vintage Paper Fair came and left Golden Gate Park's Hall of Flowers the first weekend in January. I was able to swing by for an hour Saturday morning and found many, many postcard vendors, but not much in the way of other ephemera. This year I was mostly looking forward to sorting through boxes of unlabeled, lost-in-time images. My interest was piqued by these two. What, do you imagine, are their stories?

It would be wonderful to sleep in a bed, in a tent, filled with light, no? 

Epistles of Love

Soon it will be Valentine's day, and I decided not to print valentines this year. In the meantime, here are some valentines or epistles of love from the long past:

In 1907 this was addressed to a Miss Ethel Loving.

In 1910, someone wrote on the back only: "Still am wondering."

On the back, this reads:

Dear Lizzie:
I wish you wealth.
I wish you health.
I wish you gold in store.
I wish you heaven after earth.
What could I wish you more
when the golden sun is setting
and your thoughts from care are free
when others you are thinking
will you sometimes think of me.

Be sure and bring your umbrella tonight.
Yours, write soon.
~unsigned

And, from the same hand to the same Lizzie:

Ah. Lizzie I caught you on last night by proper. Don't squeeze him so tight or you might take a button off. I received your P.C. (postcard?) alright which is very nice. Write soon.

....

Then there is a side note that says: Take off stamp.

....

Indeed, the stamp has been removed and underneath is written:

yes
yes





The scandal! The intrigue! The romance!


Also: Check out the top 10 words associated with Valentine's Day here. There are some surprising definitions and etymologies. For example, "romantic" derives from the conquering powers of the Roman empire and "amour" actually refers to illicit love affairs. And Adonis was basically a player.

Lovely Ladies

It was a beautiful, clear - if not bitterly cold - Sunday in Golden Gate Park and it was hard not to be struck by the beauty, the activity, and the vibrance of life in the city... farmer's markets and street musicians, coffee shops and bakeries with lines out the door, steam or fog rising from a botanical garden, children running through it... and then inside the Hall of Flowers it smelled just like an old library book and there was this tangible evidence of other vibrant lives, in other places, in other times. I bought mostly postcards because they are small and inexpensive and because they are interesting. I found myself feeling glad that they hadn't been thrown out with the trash.

At $0.25 or a dollar per card, I bought anything (but not everything) I found inspiring in some way. Sometimes I bought something for what was written on the backside. Sometimes for the different phrasings of greetings from olden times. Sometimes for the humor, or beauty, or general weirdness. I was drawn mostly to the Victorian and the art deco.

One of my finds at the vintage paper fair, which seemed somewhat unusual, was this postcard of a typesetting room in another part of the world, a long time ago. This is very tedious work!

I'm not going to post everything I bought, and not all at once, but here are some lovely ladies I seem to have collected:

Why the Devil Don't You Write?

I picked this up at last year's Vintage Paper Fair:

My intention at the time had been to send it to a particular someone - someone who, for some reason, has always tolerated this kind of behavior from me. But I never did send it, and now I don't think I'm likely to. I'm somewhat resolved to be less obnoxious and more of a grown up this year.

This postcard is undated, though it was sent from Harry to Ella (Miss Ella, I should say) and it seems that Harry was directing the question to himself. Postage at the time was 1 cent domestic and 2 cents foreign, and the backside was intended for the address only. This year I saw quite a few postcards aimed at goading a friend or relative into writing, though this was the only one to invoke el diablo.

hal lutsky's vintage paper fair

I've started out the new year with some very old paper. Hal Lutsky's Vintage Paper Fair was held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park this past weekend. The fair returns three times a year to Golden Gate Park, and also travels to Concord and the Los Angeles-area.

Not knowing what to expect, a friend and I went down to the Hall of Flowers to check out the fair. Primarily, it seems, it's a place to buy or sell vintage postcards and photos, booklets, posters, and other paper ephemera. You could easily spend all day looking through bins of sorted and categorized images, which really appealed to the writer in me. It's a great way to do period or location research, and also, in general, to find inspiration.

Here's some of what I took home, including my very favorite at the top: