This year’s Love stamp from Ireland issued on 11th February 2016, is based on the theme the chain of love. The stamp features an interesting and unusual graphic design of hearts forming a chain.
The heart symbol we see here has been used to symbolise love for generations. Hunters reportedly scrawled the symbol on cave walls, though why they did this nobody knows. Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart epitomised life and morality while the Greeks suggested it controlled reason, thought and emotion.
Love Letter with Fountain Pen
Love letters are one of the ways people express their feelings of love. In our modern age of computers and the internet, this form of amorous communication is gaining entirely new forms, modes and dimensions.
We are dealing with a phenomenon that probably goes beyond the classic dimension of writing love letters, which, after all, was conditioned by the individual’s degree of literacy, sense for the written expression of romantic feelings and ability to create a suitable text. Love letters were – without exception – written by hand, using pen and ink. Love letters were not mere brief communications, but deeply considered sentences. They could even take the form of poetry, but in any case they were written with carefully chosen words and the finest calligraphy. Illiteracy, or other handicaps such as poor handwriting or a lack of dexterity with romantic content, resulted in the phenomenon whereby gifted individuals would write love letters on behalf of others. There were even books and manuals published with sample content to help people compose letters and express their romantic feelings.
Love letters are (were) therefore a lot more than the mere expression in words of one’s feelings towards a certain person. They represent excellent examples of interpersonal communication, and also varying degrees of literary creativity and sense for the visual design of a text, which in some cases even included illustrations full of romantic iconography and symbols.
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