A token of my affection : greeting cards and American business culture / Barry Shank.

Includes bibliographies and index.

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.

"A Token of My Affection shows in 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."--Jacket.

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