Valentines

There is a major initiative today by #AskArchivists encouraging archives, libraries and museums to surface their collections which relate to love. The Twitter hashtag is #loveheritage.  Undoubtedly, valentine collections will form a major part of this.

My other blog: The John Johnson Collection: now and then has a new post about valentines in the John Johnson Collection and the Harding Collection, featuring Comic Valentines. In 2010, we had a small display of valentines in the Bodleian: The season for love. The poster, exhibition leaflet, captions and images are online.

There are already six tags for valentines in this blog (The Scrap Album site, the Museum of London, the Shell Art Collection at the National Motor Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, the Imperial War Musuem and The Library Company of Philadelphia).   Here are some more links:

•  Blog on The History of Valentine Day from Hull Museum Collections 
• The American Antiquarian Society's Making valentines online exhibition and Recent acquisitions at the American Antiquarian Society (a comic valentine).
• The Library Company of Philadelphia's (see yesterday's blog) Annotated bibliography on comic valentines by Elizabeth Donaldson
• A major repository for valentine cards is the Laura Seddon Collection, for which there is a short guide Victorian valentines : a guide to the Laura Seddon Collection of Valentine Cards in Manchester Metropolitan University Library compiled by Laura Seddon. The MMU Victorian ephemera web page  features three valentines from the Laura Seddon Collection.

 The standard work on the history of valentines is by Frank Staff:: The valentine and its origins. London, c. 1969