Boynton Puts Her Cards on the Table

Take a hippopotamus, a bird and two female sheep, put them together on a birthday card, and what do you get?

“Hippo Birdie Two Ewes,” a classic in greeting-card humor from a master of the greeting-card pun.

Fans of card designer Sandra Boynton would know that hippo anywhere. Just as they’d know the bewildered-looking gray cat, the wide-eyed cow and the big-snouted pig who have danced and pranced across her cards for more than two decades.

Eight thousand greetings and a billion cards later, Boynton is due out with a new line this May, confident she will not run out of fresh ideas.

“When I need them, they come,” she says.

Boynton hit the greeting card industry in 1974 at the age of 21. At the time, there were basically two kinds of cards: the traditional, flowery, often excessively sentimental, and the off-color.

Boynton offered something new: cute, but not saccharine; clever, but not cloying.

With simple animal drawings and tongue-in-cheek humor, her cards were an instant success. By 1980, she was selling 80 million a year.

“She’s witty, she’s funny, she understands what makes a good occasion,” said Joanne Fink, a greeting-card consultant in Orlando, Fla. “Before Sandra and alternative greeting cards, there were not a lot of choices.”

For the lovesick, one Boynton classic features a forlorn-looking cat and reads: “Roses are blue; violets are red. When I think of you, it muddles my head.’

Then there is the Boynton goodbye that features a dozen weeping dinosaurs. “From all your old friends,” it says.

Boynton’s messages, like her audience, have matured. In addition to her slightly flip offerings, she also does cards with family life themes.

An example: A card showing a mother hippo trying to write a letter as her baby hippos climb all over her. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, but the kids have been . . .” is cut off in a trail of ink stains.

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Boynton began designing and selling cards to help pay her tuition at Yale. In 1974, the year she graduated, Recycled Paper Greetings of Chicago saw her work at a trade show and signed her up.

Boynton’s first love was the theater. She directed local productions and attended Yale drama school--while slowly immersing herself in the greeting-card business.

She happily churned out hundreds of successful designs a year for Recycled until about five years ago, when she had a philosophical falling-out with the company.

“An increasingly large percentage of their line were cards they called risque. They weren’t risque--they were obscene. They were rude and offensive, flip, trendy, but nasty in various ways,” Boynton said recently.

She refused to create new designs for a year, until the company removed the cards. Recycled agreed to pull some of the cards, but Boynton was still unhappy, and when her contract expired at the end of 1994, she did not renew.

While offering nothing but praise for Boynton’s work, the company provided a slightly different account of the split, saying declining sales of her cards were chiefly to blame.

Alfred Hamilton, a spokesman for Recycled, said that from 1987 to 1995, Boynton went from the company’s top-selling artist to No. 8. It would not provide any sales figures.

Boynton said sales of her cards reached 80 million a year at her peak, later falling to about 20 million. She said the drop-off occurred when other major card companies began copying her style on a broad scale.

Boynton recently signed a three-year contract with Portal Publications, a card and fine-art poster company based in Corte Madera, Calif. Her first line for the company is due in stores in May.

Boynton works at her 40-acre farm in Lakeville, Conn. The converted 19th-century barn that serves as her studio and office is spacious and quiet, providing the kind of solitude Boynton says she needs for her work.

A visitor is greeted by a long rack filled with Boynton’s cards, and shelves filled with her line of stuffed animals.

Boynton, now 42, works mostly in isolation, sitting either at a long wooden table or a light table, where she creates about 200 cards a year. A single card can be created in just 20 minutes, or can take as long as 10 hours.

Sometimes, the sentiment comes first and she draws characters to fit the message; other times, the art comes first and the message follows. For Boynton, writing comes more naturally than the drawing--it’s only over the last six years that she feels she’s developed her skill as an artist.

Boynton handles almost every detail of her cards herself, including proofreading, contracts, design and licensing for Boynton mugs, T-shirts, balloons and plush toys. She has one assistant who handles administrative chores.

“I love my work. It’s such a fantasy job for me,” she said. “To me, this is success--to not have a studio with fluorescent lights, with people sitting in cubicles producing product.”

Signs of Boynton’s dry sense of humor are everywhere.

She has a ladder-back chair made with a real ladder, cabinets made to look like salt and pepper shakers, and an oversized chess set she designed for her daughter, with Boynton animal characters as the pieces.

She talks lovingly about her children--she has four, ages 6 to 16--and her husband, Jamie McEwan, a writer and former Olympic whitewater racer.

The family has not had a television in 15 years because Boynton says she does not want to be bombarded by violence and extremism. “My work depends on an optimistic view of relationships. I think I would lose that to continually be assaulted by how bad humanity is.”

When designing her cards, Boynton said, she does not aim for particular demographic groups.

“I rarely find I’m trying to figure out a market and address it,” she said. “I work for me and situations I know many people are in.”

Some of her cards are designed with particular people in mind, like one for her father, Robert Boynton, a retired English teacher. The card has an intellectual bent--a birthday greeting in iambic pentameter--that does not appeal to all buyers.

But most of Boynton’s cards have a broad charm.

“They’re whimsical. It’s hard to know what she captures, but it just catches a place in people’s hearts,” said Marianne McDermott, executive vice president of the Greeting Card Assn., the industry trade group.

Boynton plans to continue making puns and letting her animals do the talking for as long as it makes her happy.

“I still have the same pleasure a child has in creating something, finishing it, looking at it, and saying, ‘I made that.’ ”