The dictionary defines a greeting card as "A folded card bearing a message of greeting, congratulation, or other sentiment, usually sent or given on a special occasion or holiday".
Greeting cards are usually given on birthdays, for Christmas, or other holidays, but they are also sent to convey thanks or express other feelings. Greeting cards come in a variety of styles, there are both mass-produced as well as handmade versions that are distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that over one billion pounds are spent on greeting cards every year, with the average person sending 55 cards per year.
The custom of sending greeting cards has been traced back to the ancient Chinese and the early Egyptians. The Chinese exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year, and the Egyptians conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 1400s, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Year's greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-1400s.
By the 1850s, due largely to advances in printing techniques, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable means of personal communication. New trends, like Christmas cards, soon followed. The first of which appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to design a holiday card that he could send to his friends and acquaintances. In the 1860s, companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Goodall and Charles Bennett began the mass production of greeting cards. They employed well known artists of the day, such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, as illustrators and card designers.
Technical developments like colour lithography in 1930 propelled the manufactured greeting card industry forward. Humorous greeting cards, known as studio cards, became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s.
In the 1970s Recycled Paper Greetings, a small company needing to establish a competing identity against the large companies like Hallmark Cards, began publishing humorous "whimsical" card designs with the artist's name credited on the back. This was away from what was known as the standard look (sometimes called the Hallmark look). By the 1980s there was a thriving market for what were now called "alternative" greeting cards, and the name stuck even though these "alternative" cards changed the look of the entire industry.
The record for the largest number of greeting cards sent to a single person goes to Craig Shergold, an early beneficiary/victim of an Internet chain mail. In 1989, Craig, then aged nine, was diagnosed with what was thought to be terminal brain cancer. His family issued a chain letter, requesting that greeting cards be sent to Craig so that he could make it into the Guinness Book of Records. They neglected to put a time limit on the appeal and as a result, 19 million greeting cards were sent by the next year, and 35 million by the end of 1991. The good news is that Craig had a successful operation to remove the tumour, is now a healthy adult, and has requested for the mail to stop!
Article dated 10th July 2010 (based on information found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeting_card)
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