I am publishing an ongoing series of cabinet cards with women wearing love token jewelry. I have collected these photos for over twenty years now and have an impressive collection. Having acquired Victorian photos of women wearing most of the types of love token jewelry, it is time to share the collection.

Finding these photos requires painstaking hours of searching through photos at antique shows and also on eBay. It can take a week or more of fulltime work (8-10 hour days) to get through all the listings on EBay, some 30,000 to 40,000 listings. Then multiply that by a few searches a year and then over twenty years or so. It is similar to searching for a needle in a haystack. For photos that look promising, each listing has to be opened and then the photos need to be enlarged to see the details. As it turns out, some items that look round in the little thumbnail photos of the eBay search do not appear round when enlarged to 200-250 percent.

The easiest photos to find are men and women wearing stickpins and also men wearing a lapel stud. Quite often the details of the engraving are not visible or are faint due to focus, lighting, and something as small as a dime when blown up in size is going to lose the integrity of the image and fuzz. Knowledge of the styles of other types of jewelry helps in the elimination process. Even when finding an engraved image, since the item is a photo and cannot be turned over to look for the coin side, one has to assume it is a love token based on its appearance and also size/scale of the item.

I plan to show one type of love token jewelry in each issue until I use up all the photos. I estimate that it will take two years with six issues of the Love Letter per year. In the last issue I showcased simple one-coin stickpins worn by both men and women. This month I have shown fancier stickpins which I have named stickpin pairs because it takes two stickpins joined together to make up this style.