Valentine's Day romance didn't come cheap in turn-of-the-century Baltimore

Baltimoreans, it seems, were serious about their Valentine&#8217;s Day cards back in the 1890s &#8212; serious enough to spend as much as a third of their weekly salary on one.In an &#8220;I Remember...&#8221; column that ran in The Sun of Feb. 12, 1956 (just two days before Valentine&#8217;s Day), August M. Roth recalled his father&#8217;s 19th-century stationer&#8217;s store, at 636 N. Chester St. in East Baltimore (across from the Northeast Market, just blocks from Johns Hopkins Hospital). The store, Roth recalled, did a flourishing business every Valentine&#8217;s season.&#8220;My father sold hundreds of Valentines,&#8221; Roth recalled, &#8220;and some of them were expensive.&#8221; That included one attention-grabber, made in Germany with a red plush heart and &#8220;real lace,&#8221; that sold for $5 &#8212; &#8220;a little fantastic when you realize that $15 was then considered a good weekly salary.&#8221;His dad sold a dozen of them every year, the writer remembered.An old-style Valentine, included with August M. Roth's 1956 reminiscence.Naturally, not all the Valentine&#8217;s greetings Robert M. Roth sold out of his store came so dear. There were plenty of cards that sold for $2 or $3 (still a lot of money in those days); his dad would sell a gross of them every year. And for the average Joes or Josephines who wanted to proclaim their love without breaking the bank, there were &#8220;exquisite&#8221; penny postcards &#8220;covered with Cupid motifs and highly sentimental verses,&#8221; as well as comic Valentines that sold four for a penny.And then there&#8217;s this, from the small-world department: Robert Roth bought those cards, his son wrote, from a &#8220;Baltimore street jobber&#8221; named Sam Fuld. That&#8217;s all August Roth writes, but could that &#8220;jobber&#8221; (city directories as far back as 1860 include a listing for &#8220;Fuld Samuel huckster&#8221;) have been some relation to William Fuld, turn-of-the-century marketer of the original Ouija board? If so, might future commerce between the Roths and the Fulds have included Ouija-themed Valentines?The possibilities are certainly tantalizing.

Valentine's Day romance didn't come cheap in turn-of-the-century Baltimore

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