Let's see Paul Allen's card.

My friend Cecilia got her new business cards! Aren’t they fantastic? I would be insanely, murderously jealous like in that scene from American Psycho (it won’t let me embed, sorry!) if my own fantastic business cards, designed by Gwen, had not arrived yesterday!

(I remain murderously jealous of Cecy’s photography skills; alas, my camera is not great and my ability to hold my hands steady is worse.)

I even have a silver card-case around somewhere given to me by my uncle. I’ll have to dig it up for conferences.

In other news, today I was looking up “fairy” in the OED to figure out if a different spelling was standard in the Regency, when I came across the first quote for “fairy” as a slang term for a homosexual man:

1895 Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. VII. 216 This coincides with what is known of the peculiar societies of inverts. Coffee-clatches, where the members dress themselves with aprons, etc., and knit, gossip and crotchet; balls, where men adopt the ladies’ evening dress, are well known in Europe. ‘The Fairies’ of New York are said to be a similar secret organization.”

1. Was this really relevant to the American Journal of Psychology?

2. Cross-dressing coffee-clatches! It sounds so boring and like so much fun at the same time. (No offense to my friends who like to knit and crochet—it’s just not my thing.)

3. Now I want an action movie called “The Fairies of New York.” It would be about a secret organization of sexy cross-dressing spies at the turn of the century.

4 thoughts on “Let's see Paul Allen's card.”

  1. They’re stunning! Two-sided, right? So professional!
    And I am teeth-gnashingly jealous of your silver card case. That’s what I wanted, but the closest I could find was something aluminum that looked like it would fall apart (just as I was handing a card to someone on whom I wanted to make a good impression, no doubt). I finally broke down and bought a plain black wallet.
    I think the American Journal of Psychology made that coffee-klatsch thing up. The knitting and crocheting part, at least.

    1. Thank you! Yes, two-sided, the back has my book covers on it and makes me very happy–although I also really liked the suggestion from the loop of a photo and blank space for notes…maybe next time. They were quite cheap though–I can’t recommend SharpDots.com enough!
      I quite love the card case myself, but the downside is it does only hold about 8 cards. It says “MMA” on the bottom which googling suggests probably stands for Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I do see some similar cases in their online catalog. I would guess mine to be at least a couple decades old though as the silver plating is quite tarnished. (I suppose I could polish it, but does that really seem likely?)

  2. I think sometimes the tidbits you find are too exciting to leave out, no matter how irrelevant they are to the actual article. I know I’ve pout things in papers simply because they amused me and I wanted to share.

    1. Lol, I know what you mean! I wish I could believe that was the case here, but I bet the author of this 1895 article thought there was something deeply pathological about men wearing aprons and knitting…

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