5. PUT SOME EFFORT INTO IT!

By the early 19th century, valentine greetings had become everything from simple pulp cards embossed with sweet images to missives of fine paper made from the rags of linen, cotton, and hemp.

"Life was very different in those times," explains Rosin. She describes a besotted suitor working by candlelight to write, draw, cut, weave, or fold the perfect valentine using the then-luxury product known as paper.

Lesson: "Homemade" means straight from the heart.

LOVE NOTES

• "Emotionally, valentines were important because life was relatively short [a century or two ago]. Men and women wanted to get married, and they married young," says Rosin. A valentine might include paper gloves or a paper wedding band—or a metal ring or real fabric gloves. "If a woman received gloves for Valentine's Day and she accepted them and wore them on Easter Sunday, it was an acceptance of a marriage proposal," Rosin adds.

• The Civil War made love confessions urgent. Valentines from the period (1861–65) show sweethearts parting ways or a tent with flaps to pull back to reveal a soldier inside. The lovelorn would send one another locks of hair.

• In the 1800s, a woman gave the man she loved a delicate slip called a "watch paper" that was placed in his pocket watch to protect the glass. "Every time the man opened his watch to see the time, he would see this message from his beloved," reports Rosin.

• If a suitor lacked the skills to write verse in calligraphy on a piece of embossed paper stationery, he could hire a stationery store clerk with lovely handwriting to do it. Those unable to conceive an appropriately romantic rhyme could purchase a broadside or chapbook known as a Valentine Writer, which provided both declarations of love and poetic responses for a recipient to use.

Photo: John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford