Who invented playing cards? The history of the 52-card deck

Boars, bears, flowers, falcons, hounds, lions, clubs, cups, ciboria, hares… It might not come as a surprise, in the light of the above, to learn that playing cards were also a medium for fine art. combos edh Since the late 14th century, hand-painted or illuminated, luxury playing cards were produced in artists’ workshops for wealthy clients, reflecting the elegant lives they led, and used for display or as a conversation piece, rather than for actual play. These cards were in a distinct class from the ordinary ones which were condemned or banned by the authorities, who reckoned that the greed and avarice concomitant with gambling gave rise to idleness, moral corruption or social disorder. Painters and makers of missals, workers in bronze, carvers of wood, sculptors, embroiderers of tapestries, goldsmiths and, later, engravers of wood and copper thrived and plied their trades.

In fact, the most significant elements that shaped today’s deck were produced by the different cultures and countries that playing cards travelled through in order to get to the present day. Playing cards were invented in China between the 9th and 13th centuries AD. From there, they spread to Persia and Muslim Egypt, eventually reaching Europe through the Iberian Peninsula in the 14th century. The first European cards—the Latin-suited cards—were based on the Arab (“Moorish”) deck.

Design

Another printing firm had printed decks using indices in 1864 (Saladee’s design, published by Samuel Hart), however, it had been the Consolidated Card Company that patented this layout in 1875. First called “squeezers”, decks using these indices weren’t immediately well received. A competing company, Andrew Dougherty and Company initially started producing “triplicates”, offering an option that utilized mini card faces on the other corners of the cards. But fresh land was won, and indices finally became regular, and now it’s difficult to envision playing cards with no them.

Early packs involved artisan methods of card production which was time-consuming but the resulting cards were very sturdy. Pasteboard was manufactured from several sheets of paper glued together. More expensive cards were produced from engravings in copper using the skills of the goldsmith and engraver and illuminated with many colours including gold and silver. Such packs were given as wedding gifts, bequeathed as heirlooms and regarded as valuable items.

Company

There does seem to be evidence of some kinds of games involving playing cards (and drinking!) from this time onward, including cards with icons representing coins, which also appear as icons on playing cards later in Western Europe. If correct, it would place the origins of playing cards before 1000AD, and it would see them as originating alongside or even from tile games like dominoes and mahjong. Some have suggested that the playing cards first functioned as “play money” and represented the stakes used for other gambling games, and later became part of the games themselves. Others have proposed connections between playing cards and chess or dice games, but this is again speculative.

For games like Solitaire, the rules are normally made in a way as to provide a challenge without making the game state unsolvable. Depending on the desired length, round limits can be imposed to end the game as necessary. If a point system is involved in a game, then point limits may be set instead. Splitting is a process where a player splits the deck at a random point, drawing the top card.

Evidently both kinds of game existed in Europe since the first introduction of playing cards. Prohibitions of card playing and denunciations by preachers demonstrate their widespread use for gambling. It was a pastime that attracted card sharps, gamblers, cheats, swashbucklers and rogues… The emotional outbursts and bad behaviour upon losing were seen as immoral. Sir Thomas More, in his novel “Utopia” (1516) wrote that “wine tauernes, ale houses, and tipling houses, with so many noughty lewde and unlawfull games, as dice, cardes, tables tennyes, bolles, coytes” were the mothers of thieves.

The standard 52-card deck[citation needed] of French-suited playing cards is the most common pack of playing cards used today. The most common pattern of French-suited cards worldwide and the only one commonly available in English-speaking countries is the English pattern pack. In other regions, such as Spain and Switzerland, the traditional standard pack comprises 36, 40 or 48 cards. Popularized by games like Contract Bridge, Poker, and online solitaire, a deck of 52 cards is the most widely used by players around the world. The deck consists of two black suits, Clubs (♣) and Spades (♠), and two red suits, Diamonds (♦) and Hearts (♥). Each suit comprises three face cards—King, Queen, and Jack—and ten numerals, also called pip cards, ranging from one (Ace) to ten.

From the late 1500s French producers started giving the courtroom cards titles from famous literary epics like the Bible along with other classics. Designs would also have been influenced by written texts and moralised stories. Plants from the herbal, beasts from the bestiary, birds and insects from the Books of Hours, all suggesting a symbolism, a semiotic language, echoed the everyday world of popular beliefs and proverbial wisdom. The pack of playing cards gained a format and structure of its own, and became a new language. The first European references to playing cards date from the 1370s and come from Catalonia (Spain), Florence, France, Sienna, Viterbo (Italy), southern Germany, Switzerland and Brabant.

Non-standard design and use

Often the theme was a playful allusion to tournaments, cavorting children or mock warfare between animals. Cards were produced by painters whose main source of income might have been other forms of painting, not necessarily playing cards. The Medieval mind delighted in the ornate and colourful, and the art of the miniature was much admired and practised. Whereas France was the leading centre for manuscript illumination, Germany led woodcut and engravings, which have a close affinity to printed matter. The Renaissance flowered in Italy, whilst Moorish influence endured in Spain until the 15th century.

Some even require additional materials besides the actual playing cards, Cribbage for example. Classic card games are one of the most popular pastimes for friends and family all over the world. Despite the simplicity of a single deck of cards, there are nearly an infinite number of ways to utilize them. Playing cards came to Europe before 1370 from the Arab world through Spain.

One side of each card—its front, or face—is marked so as to render it identifiable and distinguishable from its fellows, while the back, or reverse, is either blank or bears a pattern common to all. In the second half of the 20th century, it became common to add a plastic coating to resist wear and even to produce all-plastic cards. These ten types of decks of playing cards don’t exhaust all that there is just yet. In a follow-up article we’ll be covering ten more different types of decks, including several types of novelty decks. The Americans are overdue companions to our historic travel, since for a very long time that they relied upon imports from England to fulfill with the requirement for playing cards.