Two unnumbered cross and flower greeting cards

@jrbuck99 slowing moving through the backlog, here are two flower greeting cards you uploaded a while back.

https://tuckdbephemera.org/items/30320
https://tuckdbephemera.org/items/30319

Let me know if those look good.

Congrats @justintanner , only one typo that I see! :grin: On the Christmas card, “cross with flows” should probably be “cross with flowers”.

Eventually, I would think that more of these similar cards will turn up and I’m wondering if, in the long run, these will continue to be considered part of the same “set”. Although the designs are certainly related, one has the common “Artistic” series logo, while the logo on the other card indicates that it’s part of the “Prize Exhibition” series. To add a further wrinkle, when you get further down in my list of uploads, you’ll come to a card with the same design as the Easter card, but with a different caption and with a logo marked “London Registered”. All these different logos probably indicate that the same group of designs were issued at different times as part of different “sets”. Just some food for thought!

Updated the typo, yeah, sets in Ephemera make far less sense than in the postcards db, I’m going to run these by Alison, maybe she knows a better spot.

I suspect that the ultimate solution to this issue in Ephemera will be to track down Tuck catalogs and/or price lists from the time period (probably the 1880s) that include the cards, either by illustration or reference. I just tried going through an 1889 catalog (or catalogue, if you prefer :grinning:) in that DB, but even though there’s lots of different “stuff” in there, greeting cards were apparently relegated to a separate list, available on request, of course.

Tuck obviously reused the same designs on many different products, and probably multiple times on similar products (such as these cards) over an extended period of time.

For instance, in going through that single year’s catalog, I ran across several different uses for an A. Wilde Parsons nautical design that’s used on a Reward of Merit card I recently acquired amongst a small group of cards which included just one I that I actually wanted (and recently uploaded here). (Since the Parsons card doesn’t fit my collection, I just put it up to resell on eCRATER.) It’s captioned “Dutch fishing Crafts on the Schelde”, and the same design can be found in the catalog under “No. 63 FOUR MARINE STUDIES”, “No. 164 FOUR MARINE STUDIES”, number 41 in “PORCELAIN PICTURES”, and possibly in a few other categories. Obviously none of these are the actual Reward of Merit card, but I expect that it could probably be found somewhere in a catalog or price list in the same general time frame, and likely in a similar set of four. I suspect the same could be said for many of the other Christmas, Easter, and other greeting cards from the 1880s. Tracking down those catalogs and/or price lists, then, is the real challenge!

Yeah, and maybe those catalogs will never be recovered.

For the cards above, we are going to leave them in the set for now. Longer term we are waiting on a software upgrade, which will allow items to categorized in ways other than just “sets”. This will hopefully make it easier to add greeting cards, which may not have a “set”.