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The International Playing-Card Society
OTHER LANDS - OTHER CARDS
Introduction
This is a brief history of playing cards during the past 600 years.
The illustrations show many of the striking variations used in other
countries, and for various card games, both now and in past times.
This information is based on a leaflet prepared by John Berry to
provide background for the Exhibition 'The World of Playing Cards' at
the Guildhall Library, London, from September 1995 to March 1996.
Other lands - other cards
English playing-cards are known and used all over the world -
everywhere where Bridge and Poker are played. In England, the same
pack is used for other games such as Whist, Cribbage, Rummy, Nap and
so on. But in other European countries games such as Skat, Jass, Mus,
Scopa, and Tarock are played, using cards of totally different
face-designs many of them with roots far older than English cards. The
history of these national and regional patterns has only recently
become the concern of students and collectors.
As many travellers to more southerly parts of Europe can tell, the
familiar suits of Hearts Spades Diamonds and Clubs give way to quite
different sets of symbols: Hearts Leaves Bells (round hawkbells) and
Acorns in Germany; Shields 'Roses' Bells and Acorns in Switzerland;
Coins Cups Swords and Clubs (cudgels) in Spain and Mediterranean
Italy; Coins Cups Swords and Batons in Adriatic Italy. In the latter
region, in particular, local packs of cards have a decidedly archaic
look about them - which reflects the designs of some of the earliest
cards made in Europe.
Enigmatic origins-from East to West
The earliest authentic references to playing-cards
in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only
in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be
understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was
invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of
coins and strings of coins - which Mah Jong players know as circles
and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic
empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as
(non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were
replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their
attendants - knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day,
packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens - nor do packs in
Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that
Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the
modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the
early Arab-influenced designs.
Variations on the original theme
In Germany and Switzerland, the two lower court
cards are both on foot, representing an 'upper' and a 'lower' rank-as
stated in the 1377 description of playing-cards. Switzerland also
preserves another feature of early German cards. The tens are
represented by a banner, showing just one suit-symbol-though many old
German banners show ten symbols. In these countries also, the 52-card
pack was shortened to 48 cards by dropping the Aces. The deuce, or
Daus, was then promoted to being the top card, and nowadays often
carries the letter A as if it were an ace. The pack was then shortened
even further. German single-figure packs habitually carried delightful
vignettes of genre scenes at the base of the numeral cards-usually
lost when packs became double-ended.
How all these variations on the basic idea came about is not fully
understood. One plausible theory is that some of them arose from
midunderstandings due to language differences, which resulted in
something like visual puns.
Alongside the evolution of these traditional designs, in most
countries there have also been persistent efforts to publish more
fanciful cards, either as artistic essays, or with some purpose other
than simple card-playing: for example, instruction, propaganda, or
even amusement. Following a French initiative, England in the late
17th and early 18th century produced a range of very idiosyncratic
packs of cards of this type.
But other countries, such as Germany and Austria, became the chief
19th-century producers of packs of fanciful cards meant for use in
card games in polite society.
Tarot - a diversion
The study of the development of playing-cards has further been
bedevilled by overmuch attention to tarot packs. To the best of our
knowledge, the first packs of cards in Europe comprised 52 cards in
four Italian-type suits each with three court cards (king, knight, and
foot-servant), and were used for games of skill involving
trick-taking, as well as for gambling games, which were often
prohibited. Very soon, the idea of adding extra cards to act as
permanent trumps came into being, and the tarot pack was born. At the
same time a queen was interpolated between the king and the knight, so
that, with the extra 22 non-suited cards, a pack of 78 cards was
created. Such packs have continued to be used for their original
purpose right through to the present day.
In the course of their long life, many variations have been tried: the
pack has been extended to 97 cards for Minchiate by adding more
trumps; shortened to 63 cards by dropping low-value numeral cards;
converted to using French suit-signs; shortened to 54 and 42 cards by
dropping numerals; but always with the object of playing trick-taking
games. Many of these variants are still in use for just that purpose.
Cartomancy and the occult
It is the choice of subjects for the trump cards which has been the
focus for so much attention by scholars and (alas) occultists. Though
it has to be confessed that playing-card historians still do not know
the explanation, enough is known to discredit wild theories which
continue to find their way into print. For instance, the tarot pack
was known before the arrival of the gypsies in Europe-which nullifies
the connection with Egypt first dreamed up in 1781, and which forms
the foundation for a mass of later occult speculation. The use of
ordinary packs of playing-cards for cartomancy does not date from much
earlier than this and, in fact, the attribution of cartomantic
meanings to the suit-cards of the tarot pack dates from 1783. But
occultists and cartomanciers prefer to ignore these truths.
Tarot gets a new look
With the conversion of the tarot pack to the French suit-system, the
trump cards, with their no longer understood imagery, were replaced by
other sequences of pictures: animals, mythological subjects, genre
scenes. The value of each trump card was now indicated by a large
numeral (the forerunner of corner-indices), so that the pictures had
no function other than decoration. However, a few sets of pictures
found favour with card players, and gradually the range of such tarot
packs narrowed down.
The playing-card picture-gallery
The use of pictures on tarot trumps was eventually copied in a modern
development of the older idea of 'pictured' cards. (Indeed, a couple
of tarot packs actually started life as normal packs of cards with
pictures instead of pips on the numeral cards.) The success of this
idea was dependent on the introduction of corner-indices-an American
innovation which was surprisingly late in being introduced in view of
much earlier experiments in that field. In America, around the turn of
the century it was exploited in order to turn photographs of scenery
into souvenir packs intended to promote the joys of rail travel. And
such packs were further distinguished by colourful pictorial designs
on the backs of the cards-which have lately become collected for their
own sake. Many modern packs of cards use a similar format to carry 52
different pictures of all kind of subjects: animals and birds, views,
works of art, cartoons, pin-ups, trains, planes, etc.
Artists transform the pack
The 19th century also saw the development of a vast industry in cards
which were meant to appeal to the public simply by being attractive-or
topical-with courts drawn from literary, historical or contemporary
figures. The fashion may have started as an offshoot of the
19th-century phenomenon known nowadays as transformation cards. The
chief idea was to take the numeral cards of an ordinary pack and to
make designs in which the shapes of the pips were an essential
element.
The resulting cards were, of course, totally unusable for
play when they had no corner-indices, and indeed the publishers of
early packs recommended that the blank backs should be used as
visiting cards (a very important item in high society). Nevertheless,
almost from the beginning, court cards were also provided so as to
complete the pack. In Europe these were drawn from literary sources,
though in England a more humorous approach prevailed. It is probable
that such ideas helped to propel a tendency for playing-cards to keep
up with current fashions and trends. Even the more run-of-the-mill
continental cards tended to have elegantly clad and fashionably
coiffured ladies instead of crowned queens.
England follows suit-reluctantly
The fashion was very slow to catch on in England. Despite a few
experiments, mostly not very attractive, it was only with the use of
chromolithography towards the end of the century that artistic packs
became viable. But English card-players had a reputation for
conservatism anyway-witness their great reluctance to change from
single-figure court cards to double-ended ones-and even then the
numeral cards were slow to follow suit. The usefulness of
corner-indices seems to have been appreciated more quickly, however.
English card-players also clung to the traditional, but
frankly ugly, designs of their court cards, which had remained
virtually unchanged since before 1700. Prior to that era, we have
scanty information about the designs of everyday cards, since few of
them have survived. An English educational pack of 'Memory cards' of
c.1605 includes copies of elegant court cards made in Rouen, where
cards of a particular design were made especially for export to
England. Study of these cards goes far to explain peculiar features of
later English-made versions. The crudity of these copies was due to
inept English block-cutters trying, with home-made products, to
compensate for the effect of the 1628 ban on importation of foreign
cards. In fact, the accidental stylisation has proved to be a
functional factor of stabilising influence in ensuring the durability
of these designs. Most modern English-style cards still betray signs
of their ancestry.
The Worshipful Company
It was on 22nd October 1628 that Charles I granted the
charter to the Company of the Mistery of Makers of Playing Cards of
the City of London, and from 1st December that year all future
importation of playing cards was forbidden. In return, a duty on
playing-cards was demanded, and the subsequent history of attempts to
extract that duty makes an unedifying and contradictory story, as any
student of such matters knows. The Livery Company still exists, and,
despite the almost total cessation of production of playing-cards in
Britain, flourishes. In 1994 it achieved its highest ambition in the
City of London, when a former Master of the Company, Alderman
Christopher Walford, became Lord Mayor. Towards the end of his term of
office, he opened an exhibition of playing-cards in the Print Room at
Guildhall Library, which houses a collection of historic playing-cards
belonging to the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, the
nucleus of which was donated by the 'Father of the Company' Mr Henry
Druitt Phillips, in 1907.
The Guildhall Library has recently been delighted to accept on deposit
a second important collection of playing-cards, owned by John
Waddington PLC. This acquisition complements the previous collection
in many instances in a very useful way, and considerably enhances the
range of material available for study.
Oriental playing-cards
This synopsis has dealt mainly with European cards though the Chinese
origins have been mentioned briefly. China was, for many decades,
rejected as the origin of playing-cards because its traditional cards
are so unlike Western ones. The connection with coins, and strings /
bamboos / batons, however, cannot be ignored. Other Chinese
playing-cards (which they themselves regard as gambling cards) use
systems rooted in dominoes and Chinese chess- and Rummy-type games
which were not known in Europe until relatively recently.
Indigenous Japanese games rely on principles of 'matching' (involving
a highly literary version of Snap) or on games involving cards which
ultimately stem from European models -heavily disguised to evade
prohibitions on gambling.
In parts of India, games are played with packs of circular
cards with eight, ten or more suits, whose designs reflect either the
departmental structure of an Indian rajah's court or the incarnations
of Vishnu (or other more complex systems), and are played something
like Whist with no trumps but with extra complications. Earlier this
century, it was claimed that there was a connection between the
four-suited European pack and the four-handed game of chess played in
India, but this theory has now been discredited in the light of the
connection with the Islamic world.
This page is maintained by John McLeod (ipcs@pagat.demon.co.uk).
Last updated 4th October 1997
EOF