The Toronto Public Library has about 300 Valentine’s Day postcards, and they make Bill Vrantsidis feel a little sad about what we’ve lost since digital communication and e-cards have displaced these discrete objects that people tucked away and kept for entire lifetimes.

“In 10 or 20 years, nobody is going to have any record of what our romances were,” the head of the art department says.

Double entendre

Hard as it is to believe, the last century has seen the complete erosion of the romantic Dutch sausage postcard market. This valentine, marked by “a certain double entendre,” as the library’s Bill Vrantsidis points out, was sent on Feb. 13, 1909, from Flint, Mich., to Toronto. The card was created by Raphael Tuck and Sons, a British company that did its printing in Saxony, Germany, at least until the First World War complicated that arrangement.

Embalmed valentine

Mention embalming, and the modern mind travels to the mortuary, but in 1908 a reader (or a student of literature) would recognize the romantic line from “The Lady of the Lake,” an 1810 poem by Walter Scott that “marked the pinnacle of (his) popularity as a poet,” according to the Edinburgh Digital Library. “With 25,000 copies sold in eight months, it broke all records for the sale of poetry, and Scott’s fame spread beyond Great Britain to the United States.”

Photo valentine

In the early 1900s, photography was becoming affordable for the masses, and people would take shots with their Kodak Brownie cameras and visit the pharmacy to have their photos turned into postcards. “The equivalent of a selfie,” Vrantsidis says. That didn’t really happen with Valentine’s Day. Instead you saw more of this style: a preprinted photo with a Gibson girl and a quirky couplet about stealing a woman’s heart. This photo valentine was sent in 1909 to Miss Lou Budge of 256 Simcoe St.

Pants and puns

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This is Vrantsidis’s favourite. It dates to the 1920s or 1930s and is less sophisticated. Gone are the embossing, 3D features, and little novelties of the early-20th century cards. Printing had become more simplified. The font is looser, a little Art Moderne, something you see more of in the 1930s. It’s also a little more risqué. Not sausage risqué, but close.

Gallantry

When people say chivalry is dead, perhaps they’re hearkening back to an era when men saved women from tiny, adorable dogs. This card manufacturer, the Gibson Art Company, was established in 1895, but Vrantsidis guesses this postcard dates to the 1920s or ’30s. The handwritten, anonymous message on the back reads: “I’m sending you this valentine/And hope you will be glad/For if you do not like it/It will make me very sad.”

Spider web

This card mixes glitter with the cliché of a woman ensnaring a man. It was mailed anonymously in 1910 to Miss Hazel Pursey of 399 King St. E. Using the Might’s Toronto City Directory, Vrantsidis found that in 1912, Hazel was a student and living with her widowed mother and her sister. Ancestry.ca showed that Hazel married landscape architect Frank Archibald Hamm in 1924. As Vrantsidis wrote on his blog, since the postcard was kept, it was likely a well-meaning joke.