Courtship Oddities

There are a staggering variety of courtship-themed postcards.

Many of them include an element of humor, and many of them are just plain weird'n' wonderful.

My high school required a year of drafting - and offered an elective 'double period' year of surveying - so ...

First up: Love On The Square.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

They were Freemasons, right?

CJP: Well-spotted!

Freemasonry is so far off of my radar screen ... that is the second time I've posted a card with unrecognized (by me) Freemason symbology.

I think that the reason the Masons are in a mental black hole is not unlike the early google search algorithms, that is, I shun anything that often appears in proximity to the words 'conspiracy', 'conspiratorial', et al.

Q/ Is the appearance of the Freemason symbology merely a convenient pun?

Q/ Or, is the card intended to appeal to the Mason market?

Q/ Or, is the pun about the 'public square', as in:

Never kiss at the garden gate,
Love is blind, but the neighbors ain't.

I'm confident that someone contemporary to the card would have been able to better assess the card's intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry ... for those who know even less about Freemasonry than I

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Q/ Is the premise that they are lost, and she's looking for a landmark?



Never underestimate the cheer-up value of the uplook!



Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I interpret the Freemason card as intended to appeal to that community. The carpenters square is the symbol of morality, virtue and order. The man sits astride it, legs crossed, connoting purity or morality. His right hand is not visible and does not appear at her waist as the pose might suggest, again showing his restraint in their courtship. Her arms form an angle that mimics that of the compass, which symbolizes beauty and balance. Their attire is chaste and she gazes at him with admiration, yet stretches away slightly, maintaining distance. In all, the card would connote to other Freemasons the confidence of moral love that their faith promotes, saying to them, how lucky you are to court one so respectable, so Godly.

If any of you kids ever wanted to know what your mother meant when she said "before you were a gleam in your father's eyes", well, here's the gleam.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey









Edited to add: Postcard from the collection of Michael Lebbert.

Footnote!

Just for grins, the Auction Leprechaun (who bestows the luck-of-the-lot) has delivered ~2/3 of a 30-postcard book about Mysticism & Alchemy, including this one about Freemasonry.

The high production value is typical of Taschen.

Given the Love On The Square postcard in the OP, I figgered this might as well go here.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey