Friendship

The friendship category sits on top of a real historical phenomenon, which is that between about 1907 and 1915 Americans sent each other picture postcards at a rate that has never been matched by anything.

The numbers are the story. Post Office figures for the year ending June 1908 record about six hundred and sixty-seven million postcards mailed in a country of eighty-eight million people. Estimates for the peak years run near a billion. People sent them across town to say they would be over on Thursday, because there were multiple deliveries a day in cities and a card would arrive in hours. It functioned the way a text message does.

Two changes made it possible. In 1907 the Post Office allowed a divided back, so a message could share the card with the address and the whole front could be a picture. And rural free delivery, extended through the 1900s, meant a farm family could both receive and send.

Collecting was the other half. Postcard albums sat in parlors the way photograph albums did, and people wrote to strangers through exchange columns in magazines specifically to trade cards with someone in another state or country. Friendship as a correspondence hobby was a mass activity.

The custom it grew out of is older and more personal. The autograph album, or friendship album, was a small bound book that a young woman carried and passed to friends, teachers and relatives to write a verse, a signature and a date. They run through the whole nineteenth century and they are one of the better surviving records of ordinary handwriting, sentiment and social circles. Many are illustrated with pressed flowers, cut paper or small watercolors.

Calling cards belong to the same world. A visitor left an engraved card on a tray in the hall, and there was an elaborate grammar to it — a folded corner meant the call was made in person, particular corners meant congratulation or condolence. Hidden-name cards, popular in the 1880s, had a die-cut scrap of flowers or a hand that lifted to reveal the name beneath, and they were sold door to door by agents with sample books.

The friendship quilt is the most substantial version of the custom. A group of women each made a block, signed it in ink or embroidery, and the quilt was assembled and given to someone leaving — often a family moving west, or a minister taking a new congregation. It is a portable record of an entire community’s membership at a moment, and a good many survive with dates and full names.

For this category, the material worth pulling is the printed sentiment of the postcard decades — flowers, clasped hands, birds, greetings set in ribbons and scrollwork — along with the photographs that show the practice itself: parlor albums, mail on a rural route, the post office counter, groups of friends posed in studios and on porches.

One dating note. An undivided back with the message written across the picture side means before 1907. It is the single fastest way to place a card.

The Flag Had No Official Design Until 1912