Studio Cards: Funny Greeting Cards and People Who Created Them

(Paperback)-Tall, narrow cartoon cards were the new big thing in greeting cards in 1958. When Hallmark Cards was printing official Christmas cards for President Eisenhower, the Eisenhowers asked Hallmark to also create a funny studio card that they could send to a few close friends. If you have one of the 200 cards that has a personal lip print (Mamie's) and a personal thumb print (Dwight's), you have a valuable collectible piece of cartoon art. And other studio cards from the 1950s and 1960s may become collectibles. Studio cards began in the 1940s in art studios in New York's Greenwich Village. A company called Panda Prints published the first humorous studio cards in 1947, and soon there were many small companies following that path. The major greeting card companies (Hallmark, American Greetings, Rust Craft, Norcross and Gibson) began publishing studio cards in 1956 and then the public general became aware of them. Hallmark named their cards Contemporary Cards, and American Greeting named theirs Hi Brows. Studio cards flourished into the 1980s and then became extinct in the 1990s, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that studio cards morphed into alternative humour greeting cards. When Hallmark and American Greetings discontinued the tall cards, their cartoonists easily moved into creating the cartoon cards you see in stores today. Hallmark calls theirs "Shoebox", and American Greetings call theirs "Just My Style". Dean Norman joined the Hallmark staff in 1956 a few months after their studio cards line was launched, and moved to American Greetings to draw Hi Brows cards from 1960 to 1990. His book, STUDIO CARDS...Funny Greeting Cards and People who Created Them is a collection of humorous stories about these writers and artists. The major companies hired young people out of college and art schools, and rarely gave them bylines or signatures on their work. Some of them worked for a career in greeting cards, and you may have never heard of them although you may have bought and sent many of their cards. Some mo