Who invented cards of deck

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. Playing cards and board games creates strong bonds among friends and families. In the late s French manufacturers began giving the court cards names from famous literary epics such as the Bible and other classics. It is from this era that the custom developed of associating specific court cards with famous names, the more well-known and commonly accepted ones for the Kings being King David Spades , Alexander the Great Clubs , Charlemagne Hearts , and Julius Caesar Diamonds , representing the four empires of Jews, Greeks, Franks, and Romans.

The common postures, clothing, and accessories that we expect in a modern deck of playing cards today find their roots in characters like these, but we cannot be certain how these details originated, since there was much diversity of clothing, weapons, and accessories depicted in the French decks of this time. But eventually standardization began to happen, and this was accelerated in the s when taxing on playing cards was introduced.

With France divided into nine regions for this purpose, manufacturers within each region were ordered to use a standardized design unique to their region.

But it was only when playing cards emigrated to England that a common design really began to dominate the playing card industry. Our journey across the channel actually begins in Belgium, from where massive quantities of cards began to be exported to England, although soldiers from France may also have helped introduce playing cards to England.

Due to heavy taxes in France, some influential card makers emigrated to Belgium, and several card factories and workshops began to appear there.

Rouen in particular was an important center of the printing trade. Thousands of decks of Belgian made playing cards were exported to countries throughout Europe, including England. In view of this, it is no surprise that English card players have virtually always been using the French designs.

But playing cards did not pass through Europe without the English leaving their stamp on them. 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 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. When printing blocks wore out, Bostock explained, card makers would create new sets by copying either the blocks or the cards.

The designs on modern Mahjong tiles likely evolved from those earliest playing cards. However, it may be that the first deck of cards ever printed was a Chinese domino deck, in whose cards we can see all the 21 combinations of a pair of dice. Introduction into Europe Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th Century, probably from Mamluk Egypt, with suits very similar to the tarot suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins also known as Disks, and Pentacles and those still used in traditional Italian, Spanish and Portuguese decks.

The first documentary evidence is a ban on their use in , Bern, Switzerland. Wide use of playing cards in Europe can, with some certainty, be traced from onwards. The Mameluke court cards showed abstract designs not depicting persons at least not in any surviving specimens though they did bear the names of military officers. This particular complete pack was not made before , but the complete deck allowed matching to a private fragment dated to the 12th or 13th Century. In effect it is not a complete deck, but there are cards of three packs of the same style.

Various Ganjifa cards from Dashavatara set, with ten suits depicting the ten Avatars of the god Vishnu. It is not known whether these cards influenced the design of the Indian cards used for the game of Ganjifa, or whether the Indian cards may have influenced these. Regardless, the Indian cards have many distinctive features: they are round, generally hand painted with intricate designs, and comprise more than four suits often as many as thirty two, like a deck in the Deutsches Spielkarten-Museum, painted in the Mewar, a city in Rajasthan, between the 18th and 19th Century.

Decks used to play have from eight up to twenty suits. Spread across Europe and early design changes Italian playing cards, Sancai-type bowl, Northern Italy, midth Century. In the late 14th Century, the use of playing cards spread rapidly throughout Europe. Documents mentioning cards date from in Spain, in Switzerland, and in many locations including Florence and Paris.