A Christmas card that caused a stir among some sober sorts in 1843 went on sale on Friday courtesy of a Kingston, N.Y., dealer in possession of an original copy of the boozy Victorian-era work.
Believed to be the first-ever commercially printed Christmas card, the greeting shows an image of revelers handling glasses of wine behind a banner declaring: “A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU.”
The children’s book publisher Joseph Cundall commissioned 1,000 copies and some 30 survive today, said Justin Schiller, whose Battledore Ltd. business sells rare books and other antiquarian materials.
The hand-colored and lithographed parchments were printed in London at Christmastime in 1843, the same season that Charles Dickens released “A Christmas Carol.”
In the card’s merry scene, a small girl sips from a glass, a wrinkle that unsettled some teetotalers of the era.
“The Temperance League became hysterical about this,” Schiller told the Daily News on Friday. “And it generated protest. And eventually I think the card was suppressed. It took about three years before the second Christmas card was ever attempted.”
Schiller put a copy on sale for $25,000 through Getman’s Virtual Book and Paper Fair. He said the print, likely a publisher’s file copy, is one of four he’s handled, with others landing at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and at the Morgan Library & Museum in Midtown Manhattan.
Christie’s auction house is also set to put a copy of the card up for bidding this month.
