All years are CE Common Era. This makes the Tang Dynasty the earliest official mention of playing cards in world history. Nobody knows who this guy actually is, but it seems that, unlike other card producers of the day, he trained as an artist as opposed to an engraver, making him unique in the business. His playing cards were far more artistically sound than his predecessors. The clubs are probably a modified acorn design, while the spade is a stylized leaf.
Late s: By the end of the century, European court cards switch from current royalty to historical or classic figures. They also produced decks for POWs that pulled apart to reveal maps when moistened. The cards frightened the highly superstitious Viet Cong, who believed Spades predicted death. Welcome to the club. Caldwell, Ross Gregory. MacPherson, Hugh. Wilkinson, W. It may even decrease your chances of burn-out and depression. Games distract your mind and allow your brain the rest it so desperately needs.
To begin with, they opted to use the names hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs to refer to the suits that the French had designated as coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles.
We do not know why, but they based two of the suit names spades and clubs on the names of the Italian deck rather than directly translate the French terms piques pikes and trefles clovers ; one possible explanation is the Spanish suits were exported to England before French ones.
The word diamond is also somewhat unexpected, given that the English word for carreau wax-painted tiles used in churches at the time was lozenge. Whatever the reasons, it is to usage in England that we owe the names that we use for the suits today.
The English government passed an Act that cards could not leave the factory until they had proof that the required tax on playing cards had been paid.
This initially involved hand stamping the Ace of Spades - probably because it was the top card. But to prevent tax evasion, in it was decided that from now on the Ace of Spades had to be purchased from the Commissioners for Stamp Duties, and that it had to be specially printed along with the manufacturer's name and the amount of duty paid. As a result, the Ace of Spades tended to have elaborate designs along with the manufacturer's name. Only in were approved manufacturers finally allowed to print their own Ace of Spades, but the fate of the signature Ace of Spades had been decided, and the practice of an ornate Ace with the manufacturer's name was often continued.
As a result, to this day it is the one card in a deck that typically gets special treatment and elaborate designs. The artwork on English court cards appears to have been largely influenced by designs produced in Rouen, Belgium, which produced large amounts of playing cards for export. They include details such as kings with crowns, flowing robes, beards, and longish hair; queens holding flowers and sceptres; and knaves that are clean-shaven, wearing caps, and holding arrows, feathers or pikes.
But whatever variety was present, slowly disappeared as a result of the industrious efforts of Briton Thomas de la Rue, who was able to reduce the prices of playing cards due to increased output and productivity. This mass production he accomplished in the s gave him a position of dominance in the industry, and the smaller manufacturers with their independent designs eventually were swallowed up, leading to the more standardized designs as we know them today.
De la Rue's designs were first modernized by Reynolds in , and then again by Charles Goodall in , and it is this design that effectively still used today. It was also around this time that double-ended court cards became common to avoid the need to turn the cards, thereby revealing to your opponent that you had court cards in your hand and the existing full-length designs were adapted to make them double-ended.
The Americans are late companions to our historical journey, because for a long time they simply relied on imports from England to meet the demand for playing cards. Due to the general public's preference for goods of English origin, some American makers even printed the word "London" on their Ace of Spades, to ensure commercial success!
From the earliest days of colonization there are even examples of native Americans making their own decks with original suit symbols and designs, evidently having learned card games from the new inhabitants. Among American manufacturers, a leading name from the early s is Lewis I.
Cohen, who even spent four years in England, and began publishing playing cards in In he invented a machine for printing all four colours of the card faces at once, and his successful business eventually became a public company in , under the name the New York Consolidated Card Company. This company was responsible for introducing and popularizing corner indices to the English pack, to make it easier for players to hold and recognize a poker hand by only fanning the cards slightly.
Another printing company had already printed decks with indices in Saladee's Patent, printed by Samuel Hart , but it was the Consolidated Card Company that patented this design in First known as "squeezers", decks with these indices were not immediately well received. A competing firm, Andrew Dougherty and Company initially began producing "triplicates", offering an alternative that used miniature card faces on the opposite corners of the cards.
But new territory had been won, and indices eventually became standard, and today it is hard to imagine playing cards without them.
One final innovation that we owe to the United States is the addition of the Jokers. The Joker was initially referred to as "the best bower", which is terminology that originates in the popular trick-taking game of euchre, which was popular in the midth century, and refers to the highest trump card.
It is an innovation from around that designated a trump card that beat both the otherwise highest ranking right bower and left bower. The word euchre may even be an early ancestor of the word "Joker".
A variation of poker around is the first recorded instance of the Joker being used as a wild card. Besides these changes, America has not contributed any permanent changes to the standard deck of cards, which by this time already enjoyed a long and storied history, and had become more and more standardized. However the United States has become important in producing playing cards. Besides the above mentioned companies, other well-known names of printers from the late 19th century include Samuel Hart and Co, and Russell and Morgan, the latter eventually becoming today's industry giant: the United States Playing Card Company.
American manufacturers have been printing special purpose packs and highly customized decks of playing cards throughout their history, but the USPCC's Bicycle, Bee, and Tally Ho brands have become playing card icons of their own. The USPCC has absorbed many other playing card producers over more than a century of dominance, and they are considered an industry leader and printer of choice for many custom decks produced today.
The true history of playing cards is a long and fascinating journey, one that has been enmeshed with many romantic interpretations over time, not all of which have a historical basis. What will the future hold for the fate of the humble playing card, and what will be the lasting contribution of our own era be to the shape and content of a "standard" deck?
Only time will tell, but meanwhile you can enjoy a modern deck today, knowing that it has striking similarities with the playing cards of 15th century Europe, and that playing cards have been an integral part of life and leisure across the globe for more than years! Where to get them: Do you want to pick up some historic looking cards from PlayingCardDecks.
Start by looking at this contemporary 40 card Spanish deck. Alternatively, check out the entire range of vintage playing cards. About the writer : EndersGame is a well-known and highly respected reviewer of board games and playing cards. He loves card games, card magic, cardistry, and card collecting, and has reviewed several hundred boardgames and hundreds of different decks of playing cards. From stars and birds to goblets and sorcerers, pips bore symbolic meaning, much like the trump cards of older tarot decks.
Unlike tarot, however, pips were surely meant as diversion instead of divination. Even so, these cards preserved much of the iconography that had fascinated 16th-century Europe: astronomy, alchemy, mysticism, and history. Some historians have suggested that suits in a deck were meant to represent the four classes of Medieval society. Cups and chalices modern hearts might have stood for the clergy; swords spades for the nobility or the military; coins diamonds for the merchants; and batons clubs for peasants.
But the disparity in pips from one deck to the next resists such pat categorization. Diamonds, by contrast, could have represented the upper class in French decks, as paving stones used in the chancels of churches were diamond shaped, and such stones marked the graves of the aristocratic dead.
But how to account for the use of clover, acorns, leaves, pikes, shields, coins, roses, and countless other imagery? British and French decks, for example, always feature the same four legendary kings: Charles, David, Caesar, and Alexander the Great.
Bostock notes that queens have not enjoyed similar reverence. Pallas, Judith, Rachel, and Argine variously ruled each of the four suits, with frequent interruption. As the Spanish adopted playing cards, they replaced queens with mounted knights or caballeros. The ace rose to prominence in , according to the IPCS. That was the year England began to tax sales of playing cards. The ace was stamped to indicate that the tax had been paid, and forging an ace was a crime punishable by death.
To this day, the ace is boldly designed to stand out. The king of hearts offers another curiosity: The only king without a mustache, he appears to be killing himself by means of a sword to the head. As printing spurred rapid reproduction of decks, the integrity of the original artwork declined.
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