The Greeting Card Association is a United States trade organization representing the interests of greeting cards, gift wrapping paper and stationery manufacturers. Its membership consists primarily of United States publishers but foreign publishers are not barred. The Association's headquarters is located in Washington D.C.
The Association sponsors the LOUIE Awards each May in New York during the National Stationery Show. These awards recognize the most outstanding designs published within the industry as judged by a panel of experts from both within and outside the greeting card industry.
The association was formed in 1941 by a small group of greeting card publishers under the leadership of George Burkhardt of Burkhardt-Warner in response to a War Department order during World War II to reduce paper use by 25%. After World War II, the Association redefined its mission, concentrating on postal affairs and the promotion of greeting card usage.
Famous quotes containing the words greeting, card and/or association:
“Half-opening her lips to the frost’s morning sigh, how strangely the rose has smiled on a swift-fleeting day of September!
How audacious it is to advance in stately manner before the blue-tit fluttering in the shrubs that have long lost their leaves, like a queen with the spring’s greeting on her lips;
to bloom with steadfast hope that, parted from the cold flower-bed, she may be the last to cling, intoxicated, to a young hostess’s breast.”
—Afanasi Fet (1820–1892)
“Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)