People also weren't obstructed by the computer so much, and the smiley wasn't even invented yet. What I mean by the former is, that I found older books to contain all kinds of very curious typography. Not that I know a lot about it, but I think that the typesetter would in that case just make a custom piece, whereas the early computers certainly didn't have an easy way of embedding arbitrary symbols in text, thereby creating the 'need' for emoticons.

EDIT: that said, I was probably wrong with most of what I said. There's been typographical variants of 'faces' since 1881 or so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley#Typographical_smileys But note how these differ a lot from what we are 'used' to. And I still doubt they'd been used in that way anyway.