A couple of years ago Hermenaut's Joshua Glenn wrote a number of advice columns on Idler Etiquette for Great Britain's Idler magazine. Here is a mini-series he did on the subject of cards: apology, personal, and calling. Enjoy them, please, and one of these days we'll get around to publishing the other columns in this series.

Apology cards

As a happening man about town, I've too often found myself spending my Sunday mornings unable to enjoy a well-earned hangover because of a different kind of pain: the pangs of conscience over the insults I'd dished out the night before; the wives with whom I'd shamelessly flirted; the souvenir bottles of saké I'd liberated; the parties I'd promised on my honor to attend, but couldn't... Conscience is, we know, just the superego's triumphant return to power after a night spent indulging the almighty Id. Still, one must make amends—but how to do so without compromising one's belief system? Two words: specialized stationery, to wit, the personalized apology card.

Imagine waking up on Monday morning, still miffed at that Josh Glenn for what he said about your taste in furniture/music/footwear at your weekend party. You glance at the mail and there lies a small creamy envelope with my name embossed on the flap. You open this envelope and discover a folded card bearing my personal emblem and the words "I apologize" in the most sincere typeface. Unfolding the card, you see that under the letter-pressed words "I'm sorry for:" I've hand-written, "behaving like an ass at your house"; and under the word "on:" I've indicated, "Saturday night." The whole affair is concluded by the words "please forgive me" in the same sincere typeface, but in a small, humble point size. My friend, I guarantee that even if my misdeeds still rankle in your breast, you will have just forgiven me.

Personal Cards

You, a hip young professional, are at a social function: a wedding party, perhaps, or a gallery opening. There you meet another hip young professional with whom you immediately hit it off—sparks of the intellectual (or merely romantic) type fly. Alas, time flies and it's time to part. The two of you agree to get in touch soon, drain your cocktails, open your purses/wallets and exchange... your business cards. What's wrong with this picture?

Friends, a business card represents you to the world as a person conducting business on behalf of the firm whose logo is stamped on the card (accompanied, no doubt, by that firm's toll-free telephone and fax numbers, signaling its strictly utilitarian purpose; or worse: the card is actually printed on a Rolodex insert!). In whatever space remains, your own name, position title, and telephone extension are offered. In the galaxy of commerce, your business card serves as a navigation device, identifying your particular planet and the precise point at which you inhabit its orbit.

It's bad enough that we should be asked to spend most of our adult daylight hours trapped in an office; but when socializing it's almost criminal to hand out a business card. Our inherent fabulousness—which is, after all is what we're here on earth to develop and display for all to see—can in no way be expressed by a business card, no matter how illustrious one's company or title. On that point I am adamant. But I wouldn't suggest reverting to scribbling one's name on matchbooks (any sexiness which that act once held has long since been commercialized out of existence), or doing what I myself did for so long: carefully crossing out every work-related element of my business card before handing it out at parties. What we all need, clearly, is what I like to call a "personal card."

Unlike the apology card, I did not invent the personal card. I have seen all varieties of these, and have but a few additional comments to make regarding the architecture and aesthetic of your personal card. Kindly avoid the too-obviously-not-a-business-card approach: the card folded into origami, for example, or the card which is not a card at all but rather a scroll, or a balloon, or a silk-screened scrap of denim. Remember, idler etiquette is at least partly about keeping people on their toes. That's why a personal card which is flat, more or less rectangular, fashioned of paper, and wallet-sized—resembling a business card, in other words—is essential.

Your personal card should present your name and the bare minimum of information necessary for contacting you, and should only bear a descriptive word or two about you if you feel it adds to the desired effect. Sobriquets like Cad, Bon Vivant, Raconteur, and (of course) Idler are good; titles like Executive Assistant or Associate Producer are bad. I also approve of perplexing and/or mysterious descriptors like Spy, Freedom Fighter, or Player. A friend of mine, who supports himself by drawing typefaces (known as fonts) has a personal card which I admire greatly. Beneath his name it reads, simply, Alphabetician. Now that's fabulous.

Calling Cards

Here in the United States, which remains obsessed with society films of the Henry James/Jane Austen variety, even someone as unsentimental as I am can sometimes find himself wedged between overwrought suburban housewives weeping over just such a movie. That is to say, the housewives are weeping at the plight of, for example, a well-bred but impoverished young woman being snubbed by the The Right Sort of People; but I'm weeping at the sight of all that beautiful stationery whose purpose we no longer understand. I particularly enjoy scenes in which servants enter bearing trays heaped (or, tragically, not heaped) with calling cards, or in which calling cards are delivered by functionaries whose career is entirely given over to that activity.

The idea of spending the day entertaining friends in one's parlor, or being entertained for hours in someone else's parlor, is undeniably an appealing one. And those of us who wish to devote our lives to fabulous self-expression need to regularly indulge ourselves in this increasingly rare sort of unmediated face-to-face interaction with our equally fabulous friends. But it's so difficult to fight against the culture of mediation! Television, home video, e-mail, and the Internet are just too seductive. That's why we need to use guerrilla tactics in order to create a grassroots culture of face-to-face-ness. Which is where the calling card comes in.

This particular sort of card (which is absolutely not to be confused with the business card or the personal card) can deliver gigabytes of information to its recipient through subtle clues—including size, typeface, and color. I love the whole concept of letting people know that "I'm receiving visitors this week" or "I'll never speak to you again" through a mutually agreed-upon system of sending and receiving calling cards. It's all so elegant and tactile, so symbolic and interpretive: It appeals to both the aesthete and the philosopher in me.

A version of these columns originally appeared in The Idler.