His cards

These days there is no limit to the amount of information we cram onto our business cards, as they are known—visiting cards as people used to call them—and an infinite array of design possibilities, front and back, vertical and horizontal. However, for most of his professional life as a city solicitor in Melbourne, and sometime senior partner of the old firm of Mallesons, my father used this one—a symphony of plainness, the ne plus ultra of minimalism, entirely bereft of supplementary information. In fact the version to which he adhered with his customary scrupulousness was in scale and quality of embossing largely the form in which the gentleman’s visiting card existed at the end of the nineteenth century. (Ladies’ were significantly larger.) Perhaps the persistence of the old-style “card” in Australia was no more than a persistence of imperial usage until the end of the 1960s, a process of gentle drift. In fact present arrangements are, in a way, a reversion to more inventive, and certainly more decorative, eighteenth-century progenitors. This is made clear by the anonymous author of a leading article in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art (fifth series, Vol. 13, No. 664, Saturday, September 19, 1896, pp. 593–94):

The visiting-card as we know it is barely a century old. Like most other every-day articles of use and ornament, it is the result of a gradual process of evolution; and the form which the card now universally takes is by no means so attractive as those which it took in some of the earlier stages of its history. Of late years, indeed, there have been whispers of a new departure in cards. A revolt from the prevailing monotony in “paste-boards” has more than once been threatened; and the great army of those who suffer from collector-mania have been tantalized with the prospect of new worlds to conquer, in the shape of visiting-cards ornamented with elaborately engraved devices. The idea of those who mooted the change was to give the visiting-card a touch of individuality, so that each card, like a book-plate, should be a witness to its owner’s individual taste and inclinations, and not a mere machine-made reproduction of a universal pattern. But nothing came of the proposal, and the present-day visiting-card still wears its uniform of plain black and white. Had the proposed change been carried out, however, it would simply have been a revival of a fashion that prevailed more than a hundred years ago.

Visiting cards were a development from the old style of message and invitation cards. Throughout the greater part of the last century it was customary to write messages and invitations on the backs of used playing-cards. The particular card used was often chosen at random; but occasionally it was picked out with an eye to the delicate suggestiveness of some one suit. This sometimes gave the recipient an opportunity for airing his or her wit…

From the use of such cards simply for invitations and other messages it was an easy transition to their use for visiting purposes. At first the person who so used them simply wrote his name across the back of a card. Dr. Doran, in one of his pleasant books of gossip, declares that it was in Paris, about the year 1770, that the custom was introduced of visiting en blanc, as it was called, that is by leaving a card. Old-fashioned folks, he says, who loved to visit in state and display their costumes, called this fashion fantastic, and strongly opposed it. But, of course, opposition of this kind was bound to fail. The ceremonial leaving of a card as equivalent to a visit may have begun in 1770, but the writing of a name on a card and leaving it when the person called upon was not at home was certainly practiced somewhat earlier…

Writing the name on the back of a card was soon found to be too simple a matter, and it became the practice to write the name either on the backs of playing-cards, or on the face of cards adorned with engraved devices. Classical ruins and the like designs were highly fashionable. Cards so engraved appear to have been sold in packs, with assorted views; for two or more cards have been found bearing the same name written across them, but with quite different pictures as backgrounds. The practice of writing the name seems to have been soon superseded by engraving the name as well as the background. Much artistic ability and ingenuity was devoted to these cards…

Visiting-cards seem to have been known by various names. Madame d’Arblay in her Diary uses the term “name-card.” They were often spoken of as “tickets.”…