Dec 19, 2025 Book of the Week — Christmas Cards and their Chief Designers

“For if the present generation find them merely “old-fashioned,” in a few decades, they would appear “quaint” and “curious,”
and finally be considered very interesting ephemerae of a very interesting period in English art production.”

– Gleeson White on the subject of holiday cards

Dear Rare Reader,

As always, the end of Fall semester brings with it the holiday season. This year is no different and with finals over, there is much to do: Presents to buy, cookies to bake, trees to decorate, Christmas carols to escape, the list goes on and on. But perhaps my favorite, time-honored seasonal tradition is the holiday card. Though rarely unique and frequently impersonal, it’s hard not to delight in the Shutterfly templates that arrive in the mail, faces of family and friends throughout.

This year, the rare books team will celebrate the enduring and endearing tradition of season’s greetings through a three-part series highlighting different aspects of the holiday card within our own collection. We’ll explore its history, examine modern examples, and conclude the festivities by focusing on the most important part of any postal endeavor: the stamp.

Wishing you joy, cheer, and warmth all along the way!

Happy holidays,
The University of Utah’s Rare Books Department

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Like many beloved Christmas traditions, the holiday card traces its origins to Victorian England and is perhaps most comprehensively documented by Joseph Gleeson White in his 1895 volume Christmas Cards and Their Chief Designers. Part love letter and part historical record, the book tracks the card, starting with its 1846 beginnings in England, highlighting the tradition’s enduring resonance across time and place throughout.

White, the son of a London bookseller, published the book in the London offices of “The Studio,” a fine and decorated arts magazine published from 1893-1964. The magazine was founded by Charles Holme, a fabric tradesman in London, with the intention of creating an international publication that would transcend cultures and international borders.

Holme enlisted White as the first editor of the magazine in 1893, before fully transitioning into the role in 1895, though White continued to contribute to the magazine until his death in 1898. Christmas Cards and their Chief Designers is an example of such contributions. A thin publication of just fifty-six pages, White’s book is bound in blueish gray boards, but the traditional form of the magazine manifests in nearly every other aspect of the object, down to its unmistakable glossy, waxed paper.

Christmas Cards and Their Chief Designers
Joseph Gleeson White (1851-1898)
London : New York : Offices of the Studio, 1895
xNC1866 C5 W55 1895

The tone of the book is sarcastic, snarky, and lyrical, often positioning the holiday card as an object of little artistic value before White quickly retraces his steps to reveal his deep fascination with the public’s love for the unsuspecting object. Early on, Gleeson dismisses the textual aspect of the card:

“It is obvious that for the sake of their literature no collection would be worth making. We are, therefore, compelled to own that it is in the design alone that any reasonable excuse can be found; otherwise as objects of sentiment, literature, or documents of social interest, the post-mark or the railway ticket might be collected with not less consequence… The designs, however, have a distinct interest.”

It is then and there that White’s goal becomes apparent to the reader: Not only is he trying to trace the origins of the holiday card, but also its limitations as a serious art form. In an effort to accomplish this task, the book examines the cards of over fifty artists from a wide-ranging array of companies and producers throughout the Western world. Despite White’s valiant effort to establish a standardized understanding of the holiday card, the task grows increasingly difficult as he moves forward in time. What begins as a wholesome tradition soon becomes unruly, expanding into a full-fledged cultural obsession, an evolution White captures when he writes:

“From the duchess to the dairy-maid, a demand for the cards arose. Sent at first to familiar friends only, they gradually became formal tokens dispatched to almost everyone on my lady’s visiting list, or the most distant cousins and acquaintances of those who do not manage their social amenities with the book-keeping absolutely essential for folk in society.”

White attributes the first holiday card to Sir Henry Cole, an affluent British inventor and businessman of the Victorian era. Cole, who later became the first director of London’s renowned Victoria and Albert Museum, has been said to create the first commercial holiday card during the Christmas of 1846 after becoming overwhelmed with the number of season’s greetings he had received. Ironically, Cole was largely to blame for this increase in mail because of his involvement in developing the penny post, a British postal system that allowed for individual pieces of mail to be sent for just a penny a piece.

For a short-lived time, Cole’s card served as the model for what a commercialized holiday card should look like: a single, flat piece of paper with a seasonal design and holiday greetings. But, as the tradition began to grow in popularity, all predictable designs seem to be thrown out the window. In their stead comes a deluge of cards depicting medieval scenes, anthropomorphized objects, and mystical fairies wishing you and yours a merry Christmas.

White rightly sums up the strange evolution of the tradition: “…in short, the subjects are, in vulgar parlance, ‘weird’ and alarming on the one hand, and distinctly uncomfortable on the other.”

Though a rather frank assessment, White’s use of the word weird, seems to me, widely indisputable. Take for instance, one of my personal favorites in the volume: two trout wishing the recipient “many, merry Christmas greetings.”

While I still am, and will continue to be, baffled by the relationship between aquatic life and holiday greetings, I can’t help but view this card as a perfect example of the era and a perfect reflection of the ambiguity of the greeting card industry’s earliest days. By the end of the book, the defining artistic features of the holiday card have yet to fully materialize. Nevertheless, White carefully traces its gradual formation, guiding the reader to the emergence of the modern holiday card.

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Contributed by Theadora Soter, Rare Books Assistant Curator

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