The Preposterous Tarot (Beginnings)

         Now finally I’ve reached the point where I can explain what’s behind all this recent focus on block printed cards and cartomancy.  It’s because I’ve been having my own fun with the idea.  I’m making my own preposterous “tarot” deck of Deeply Significant Arcane Images.  Let me break down how I’ve been thinking about this project.

        1.  Since I always work on carving blocks during my shows, and since I have so many shows during the fall through holiday season, I knew I was going to need a lot of block designs to feed my need to be carving for so many days.  It occurred to me that making a “tarot” deck would keep me busy for a good long while!

        2.  I put “tarot” in quotation marks because my deck is not an adaptation of the now-standard tarot decks known among English-speakers.  The images are completely my own off-the-rails ideas, so perhaps I should be calling this the somewhat more generic term “oracle deck.”  However, in colloquial speech, people know what I mean by “tarot,” and besides, if you read my Words of the Month - Cartomancy, you’ll learn that the word tarot originally meant specifically the special trump cards added to a deck, and initially there was no standardization about what figures those cards had to represent.  There were lots of different versions and themes floating around, including Roman mythological figures, animals, Virtues, and others.  You can see some of these in my post on Cards as Fantasy.

        3.  The same etymological logic justifies my use of the word tarot for a collection of cards that includes only the ones with special pictures.  Nowadays tarot aficionados say that a full tarot deck includes all the regular suit cards of the Minor Arcana as well as the 22 figure cards of the Major Arcana, but the root word from which “tarot” derives originally referred only to those now-called Major Arcana trump cards.  My interest is really not in making an actual tarot deck for use by actual tarot cartomancers, but rather simply to amuse myself (and hopefully those who look at my art) with the fun cards.

        4.  So, given all that, what cards am I making?  I decided to give my Preposterous Tarot some arcane mythology of its own and divide it into the Trine Hominum (people), the Trine Bestia or Trine Zoic (animals), and the Trine Res (objects).  Each card is titled not simply with a noun, such as “The Emperor” or “The Chariot” of the standard tarot deck, but also with an adjective.  And I’ve been choosing particularly splendid adjectives: delightful, archaic, abstruse, entertaining, and even silly adjectives.  The nouns, too, tend toward the obscure and random, allowing me to entertain myself greatly with how to pair them.  (Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that entertains me.)

        5.  Therefore, I am planning to make a total of 22 card designs.  When I finish them all, depending on feedback, I may make a poster showing them all, and/or have actual decks printed up, and if I do either of those schemes then I’ll make a 23rd design for the card backs.  So far I’ve finished twelve, so I’m just over halfway through the project.  I have designs or specific plans for three more, which leaves seven more spots that are pretty wide open (plus the possible back).  These designs will all have to fit into their proper Trines, though!

        6.  In case it is not clear by now, I feel no particular reverence for the standard tarot deck and I do not believe that it has any special occult or magical properties.  That said, I know that some people do find the cards useful in helping them to focus on their intuitions and subconscious, and I think there’s absolutely no reason that my cards couldn’t be used that way, too.  If they bring out associations and suggest connections and ideas for you, then by all means embrace it.  Personally, I think that’s one of the superpowers that all art can have.  However, to have fun with the idea, I’ve also got my own theories about what Arcane Significance each of my cards might represent, and if I do ever follow up on further schemes with them, I could write up a little pamphlet about interpreting the Preposterous Tarot.  However, since I don’t believe in the power of cards to foretell the future, I can’t promise you what might actually happen!

        7.  In today’s post I’m sharing a few of the cards that I’ve done so far.  You can see all of my finished designs posted on my web site.  Twelve are up now, but that web page will continue to be updated as each new card is completed.  I have three more art sales this year, all in early December, which probably means about 6 more cards completed by the end of the year.

        What do you think of this?  Amused or intrigued?  Do you have a favorite card?  Do you have any inklings of what significance they could have?  Do you think I should make a poster or have proper decks printed?  I’d love to hear your reactions!

[Pictures: I - The Mellifluous Gardener;

II - The Feathered Locksmith;

VI - The Numinous Mailman;

XXI - The Three-Tailed Shadow;

IX - The Ambivalent Lungfish;

X - The Rambunctious Jerboa;

XVIII - The Irrefrangible Gazebo;

XIX - The Cantankerous Gnomon,

all rubber block prints by AEGNydam, 2026 (Images from NydamPrints.com).]

Words of the Month - Cartomancy

         Continuing with my theme that started with block printed playing cards and moved on to cards used for divination, I now have Words of the Month that are related to cards and cartomancy.  And with that, I’ll begin with

cartomancy - this is the word for fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards.  The first element is from the Latin for “card,” while the suffix -mancy comes ultimately from Greek from “oracle, divination.”  This makes it a cousin of the praying mantis, which comes from the noun version of the same Greek root for a “seer, one who divines.”  Playing cards, by the way, are the first use of the word card in English in the early fifteenth century, and it was over a century before the use expanded to other small, stiff pieces of paper.  Ornamental greeting cards were first called such in 1862.

clubs and spades - These words are interesting not so much for their etymology as for the mix-up which attaches them to their suits.  Clubs is a reasonable English translation for the Italian suit bastoni, which was probably derived from the Mamluk suit of polo sticks, but is now called in English batons.  Its shape, however, is from the French suit in which it should properly be called a clover or trefoil, and which probably derives from the German suit of acorns.  Spades, meanwhile, is the Italian for the suit of swords, but its picture is the French piques or pike, which probably derived from the German leaf suit.  Confusing enough for you?  As I mentioned in the post on the printmaking history of cards, the French suits became dominant because their simplified two-color system was easier, quicker, and cheaper to print than the other European suit pictures that required four colors and lots more detail.  But why the English language persisted in using the older Italian words for two (but only two) of the suits is a mystery.

        in spades - (ca. 1929) Because spades are the highest-ranking suit in games such as bridge, to have something in spades means “in high degree, in abundance.”

suit - Ultimately from Latin, English got the word from French around 1300, meaning “a band of followers, retinue,” as well as the livery they might wear.  This gave rise by the late fourteenth century to “a set of clothes to be worn together,” “a series or sequence,” and “the group of playing cards bearing the same symbol.”  Around 1670 we get the phrase to follow suit with its figurative sense expanding beyond card games.

jack and knave - The face cards or court cards are another aspect of card decks which have varied widely over time and geography.  Kings, queens, over marshals, under marshals, maids, valets, farmers, and knights were among the variants.  In English, however, we now use kings, queens, and a third face card called knave in British English and jack in American English.  Knave derives from German Knabe, meaning “boy,” which may have originally been the prince, but then became the page or servant.  The word jack could refer to any man (see my prior post on J is for Jack), but why did it replace knave for cards?  In 1864 Samuel Hart published a deck of cards with a Jack to make it easier to differentiate the King (K) from the Knave (Kn) in the indices on the corners of a fan of cards.  Because Hart was American, the use of the word jack is more common in America - and because the usage was American, British English speakers considered it vulgar to call the “knave” a “jack,” despite the obvious advantage!  However, why Hart chose Jack instead of the French Valet or any number of other possible non-K synonyms, I don’t know.

joker - The joker joined the modern deck of cards during the US Civil War, as a trump card for the popular game of euchre.  It was Samuel Hart once again who printed the first illustrated card for the purpose in 1863, but he called it the “Imperial Bower.”  Bower was the standard word for trump cards in euchre, and it derived from German Bauer, meaning “farmer,” which was another name for the jack.  In the late 1860s we begin to see cards called “joker,” apparently because Juckerspiel was the original name for euchre.  But that brings us back to two cards labelled J just as we eliminated the confusion of two cards labelled K, so we probably should have stuck with bower!

ace - (ca. 1300) This word derives from Latin via Old French meaning “one,” and originally meant one on a die.  This was considered to be bad luck or “something of no value” until the word came to be applied to the playing card with one pip in the 1530s.  Since the ace in cards is usually the best, the metaphorical meanings for good luck or high value didn’t arise until the eighteenth century with the booming popularity of card games.

tarot - This word arrived in English at the end of the sixteenth century, by way of French, from Italian tarocchi, which was the name of a card game that used five suits of cards: the four suits in a regular deck, plus a fifth suit of special cards.  The word originally referred to just the special cards, and since the game itself never really caught on in England or with English-speakers, it’s not unreasonable to use the word tarot in English to refer to the special cards only.  But what is the etymology of tarocchi?  That’s a mystery, but the word taroch meant “foolishness” in Italian around the same time that the game started to be called this, so that seems suggestive.  In the fifteenth century before it got the name tarocchi, the game was originally called trionfi, which is the origin of…

trumps - In the first half of the fifteenth century the words trionfi (Italian) and triumphorum (Latin) were used to describe elaborate hand-illustrated decks with a suit of extra cards, commissioned by Italian noblemen.  It’s likely that the name came from the fact that many of the characters in the special cards were based on those in theatrical processions called trionfo.  Originally, therefore, the roots of the words tarot and trump were synonyms for these special illustrated cards.  By the time the word entered English around 1520, however, trump already referred to any card or suit of cards that ranked above the others, and was used in a number of different card games.

arcana - Modern tarot decks designed for occult purposes divide the Minor Arcana (regular suit cards) from the Major Arcana (the special illustrated cards).  This usage for cards began in the eighteenth century, but the word had been in English since about 1590, from Latin for “hidden things, mysteries.”

oracle - The more general term for a deck of cards designed for divination is an “oracle deck.”  Oracle comes from Latin, meaning “a message from a god, expressed through a priest or priestess.”  It entered English in the late fourteenth century.

left in the lurch - (1590s) This phrase comes from the card game cribbage, where a lurch is when a player loses by less than half the winner’s score.  It comes from Middle French lourche, where it was the name of a game similar to backgammon.

aboveboard - (1610s) From poker or similar games, in which putting your hands under the table might allow you to cheat by switching out cards.  Thus above board (board being the table) meant you were not trying to trick your opponents.  Meanwhile, the opposite phrase is under-the-table (1940s).

        For more magical playing card action, you can revisit the knavish antics in the court of Hearts at Q is for Queen or consider making your own deck at Stay-at-Home Activities.  And if you’re wondering how a mere game could involve so much lore, just see all that chess has given to the language in my Words of the Month - Checkmate!

[Pictures: King of Acorns and (below) Ober of Leaves, woodcut pub. by Anton Herbst, Prague, 1800-25 (Image from The British Museum);

Queen of Clubs from tarok pack, hand-coloured woodcut pub. by Johan Norbert Hofman, Vienna, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

King of Leaves, hand-coloured woodcut pub. by Joseph Fetscher, Munich, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Face cards from “Republic” deck, design by UUSI Studio, Michigan (Image from uusi.us);

Valet d' Sper from tarot pack, hand-coloured woodcut by J H Ræder, Switzerland, 1783 (Image from The British Museum);

Cavalier di Bastoni from tarot deck, wood block print with stencil, pub. by F.F. Solesio, Genoa, 1865 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Fante di Danari from tarocchi pack, hand-coloured woodcut pub. by Fratelli Avondo, Italy, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Two Jokers from card deck, linocut by anonymous student at the Hannover Werkkunstschule, ca. 1930 (Image from Peter Endebrock’s Playing-card Pages);

Ace, linoleum block print by Børge Bredenbekk (Image from Too Many Prints Artshop);

The Empress, wood block print, Italy, 15th century (Image from National Gallery of Art);

The High Priestess, linocut print by The Printmaking Bee (Image from The Printmaking Bee Etsy shop);

La Prudence from Les Récréations de la Cartomancie by Mlle Lemarchand, 1867 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

The High Priestess, lino print by Steph (Image from Cheers Thanxalot).]

Cards as Fantasy

         Pretty much as long as there have been playing cards in Europe, since the 14th century, they have been used for fortune-telling.  This should come as no surprise because humans seem to be willing to use practically anything to try to divine the future.  To look back at the history of playing cards, you can do a quick review of my post on Cards as Block Prints.  To look at some of the wide array of things that have been used for prophecy, read my post on Words of the Future.  I want to state at the outset of this post that although there are people who find the use of cards (especially oracle decks like tarot) to be useful in helping them focus on their intuitions and subconscious, I believe that any actual magic ascribed to fortune-telling or fortune-telling cards is pure fantasy, and that’s precisely why I’m interested in it here in my blog about fantasy.

        With that, let’s begin with the reminder that early playing cards in Europe were not standardized, and often included illustrations on all the cards, not just the face cards that have pictures in a standard deck today.  (You can see a sampling of these charming illustrations in the previous post.)  Around 1420 a Duke of Milan commissioned a deck of cards that included a fifth suit of 16 trump cards illustrated with Greco-Roman gods.  This is the earliest known appearance of such a suit of trumps, and it was followed by variations throughout most of Europe, all of which were used for trick-taking games.  Presumably they were also used for fortune-telling, just as other playing cards were, but they were not specially designed for the purpose.

        The invention of the printing press simultaneously spread cards more widely and made them more standardized.  The Tarot of Marseille (which originated in Milan in the early fifteenth century but was being manufactured in Marseille in the nineteenth century) became a standard that is used to this day both for games and for divination.  It includes 56 cards in 5 suits: swords, cups, coins, batons, and trumps.

        Not until 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming that the tarot cards had a special occult connection with ancient Egyptian wisdom, did the idea spread that there was some particular esoteric significance to the tarot deck.  Once the idea was started, however, it was embraced with enormous enthusiasm.  In 1785 Jean-Baptiste Alliette (aka Etteilla) published a highly influential book about divination using the tarot deck, and in 1789 he published his own deck designed especially for occult use.  Ever since, new versions of decks have been designed to emphasize their magical meanings.  Despite these French origins of the idea, it’s in the English-speaking world that we look on the tarot deck as being exclusively for divination, since we have never had a tradition of playing the games for which the decks were invented.  One of the most famous and foundational modern decks, the Rider-Waite Tarot, was published in 1909, designed by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to occultism.

        I’ve got a lot of pictures to share, and I’m starting with some of the very early hand-painted cards, which demonstrate why decks of cards (magic or mundane) were luxury items before they were printed.  There are two versions of the World card, plus a card probably from the wands suit, which I picked because he appears to have a pet basilisk.  And then I’ve got some early printed cards all from one deck: the Popess, Star, and Magician.

        Next is a collection of trumps from  seventeenth and eighteenth century printed decks, all of which are pretty crude compared with the painted and illuminated works of art with which we started.  The entire first row comes from one deck, and demonstrates that the modern subjects of the cards were by no means mandatory.  XIII in this deck is Death, which is true in some other decks, as well, including the last card on the bottom row (which I picked because it looks so oddly friendly).  I’m guessing XXIIII is Justice, which is a subject that appears in many other decks, but not with that number (and why does it have a weasel on the scales and a hedgehog below?)  However, the others don’t seem to correspond with any of the standard modern trumps, so hold that thought because it will be important when I get to a future post.  On the second row I’ve got the Devil, then the Emperor and Justice from one garishly painted deck, and then Bacchus.  He replaces the Pope in an otherwise fairly standard deck, and this, too, was not too unusual.  The Pope and the Woman Pope or Popess seem to have been a little controversial in areas where Catholics and Protestants were in direct conflict, and they were sometimes switched out for various different figures - but I think replacing the Pope with Bacchus is kind of funny.

        Carrying on with a variety of decks that follow the fairly standard tarot assortment, I’ve got a Magician with a fabulous outfit and an array of interesting props on his table; the High Priestess (in place of the Popess) from the famous Rider-Waite Tarot; and Lovers from a deck of much higher quality woodcuts than those in the last grouping.  I chose the Devil in the next row because it looks so nicely different from the one above, Temperance because she’s a really lovely woodcut, and the Star from a deck printed with more modern nineteenth century methods.  She has particularly nice scenery.  The cards in the bottom row show a double-ended deck, which shows you that it was really for playing card games rather than fortune-telling, but these are consistent with the now-standard tarot cards: Death again, the Tower (which looks doubly catastrophic when it’s falling down from both ends), and the Star with very different iconography from the one above.  (You can also see that the two Stars are numbered differently.)

        Generally I’m only interested in the Major Arcana: the trumps (including the Fool) because in a lot of decks the Minor Arcana looks too much like a regular deck of cards to scratch my itch for magic.  However there are decks - mostly among the older ones and the newer ones - that give every card its own interesting and potentially magical picture.  In the same deck from which I shared the Lovers above, the knave-equivalent face cards in each suit are some sort of hybrid mythical creature.  The one for cups is especially intriguing, since it combines human with fish tail, mammal forepaws, and bird wings.  Then I have the 2 and 9 of swords from the Rider-Waite deck, which both look Highly Significant, just as a deck of occult mysteries should.  And the last card in this group is the 6 of cups from the Thoth Deck, another influential reimagining from another one-time member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  This one leans hard into almost Rorschach-like imagery.

        Although I’ve naturally spent a lot of time in this post on the decks that are more directly related to what is now called the tarot, that’s never been the only option when you’re looking for mystical meanings in cards.  One whole branch of decks made for the tarocchi card game used animals for the trumps, and the choice of animals was pretty wide open.  I’ve chosen several fantastical versions from different decks, a unicorn, a seahorse-unicorn, and a double-ended card in which the two sides are different, combining a dragon and a bat.  In the second row are two more cards from the deck that you should be able to recognize from earlier: a salamander for card XX and “Fame Flies” for an unnumbered card.  And then I’ve given you four cards from a deck that had a whole theme of merpeople.  In card XIV we’ve got the mer version of Carmen Miranda, while card XV has an alchemist with a mermaid and sea lion, XVI has a merman hoisting some kind of crazy fish, and card XIX has a gorgeous pagoda along with a couple of beautiful mermaids.  These decks, despite their magical imagery, were designed and produced primarily for playing cards rather than for any occult purposes.

        So then finally we come to the not-quite-tarot decks that were actually designed with the intention of using them for divination.  The Game of Hope was invented in Germany around 1799 and came with a booklet that gave instructions for using the deck either to play a parlor game or for divination.  The first two cards in this last batch come from one of these decks and you can see that each card has both a picture to which meanings can be ascribed and also insets with regular cards with both German and French suits.  The Game of Hope was adopted by Marie Anne Lenormand, who became a wildly famous and successful fortune-teller after the French Revolution.  (She claimed to have read cards for various leaders of the French Revolution, as well as Empress Josephine and Tsar Alexander I.)  Her success led to many versions of these decks being marketed as Lenormand decks for fortune-telling, and the ship comes from one such, while the key comes from another that dispensed with the inset playing card design and instead added little rhyming proverbs.  The last two cards here were designed by the celebrity fortune teller I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Etteilla, from roughly the same era as Lenormand.

        So now we’ve had the history of block printing cards, and we’ve had the future as foretold by cards, but there’s still more cartomancy to come.  My next trick will be to give you Words of the Month connected with cards and cartomancy.

[Pictures: World, from the Este tarocchi cards, paint and illumination, Italy, ca. 1450 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

World, from the Visconti di Modrone tarocchi cards, paint and illumination by Bonifacio Bembo, Italy, 1442-47 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

XVI (something of wands?) from the Sola Busca tarot deck, painted, Italy, 1491 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Popess, Star, Magician, wood block print cards, Italy, ca. 1550, (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

5 cards from a tarot pack, wood block prints, Italy, ca. 1675 (Image from The British Museum);

Le Diable from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal, France, 1701-15 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

L’Empereur and Justice from tarot pack, wood block prints, Switzerland, 1783 (Image from The British Museum);

Bacus from tarot pack, wood block print, pub. by Jean Gisaine, Flemish, 18th century (Image from The British Museum);

XIII (Death) from tarot pack, wood block print, Germany, 18th century (image from The British Museum);

Il Bagatto from tarot deck, wood block print with stencil, pub. by F.F. Solesio, Italy, 1865 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

The High Priestess, 2 of Swords, 9 of Swords from Rider-Waite tarot deck, illustrations by Pamela Coleman Smith to design by Arthur Edward Waite, 1909 (Image from WaiteSmith.org);

V (Lovers), Knave of Swords, Knave of Cups, Knave of Coins, XX (Salamander), Fama Volat from minchiate deck, wood engraving with stencil, pub. by A. Baragioli, Italy, 1860-90 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Le Diable from Les Récréations de la Cartomancie by Mlle Lemarchand, 1867 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Temperance from a Venetian tarot deck, wood block print, Italy, undated (before 1896) (Image from The British Museum);

Le Stelle card from tarocchi deck, chromolithograph pub. by Fratelli Avondo, Italy, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Death, Tower, Star cards from tarocchino deck, woodcut pub. by Germano Natali, Italy, early 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Six of Cups from Thoth Tarot deck, illustration by Frieda Harris as designed by Aleister Crowley, 1944 (Image from Crowley-Thoth.com);

VII (Unicorn) card from tarok pack, wood block print pub. by Johann Gottlob Hegewalt, German, ca. 1770 (Image from The British Museum);

VIII (crocodile/Bat) card from tarok pack, wood cut pub. by Joseph Fetscher, German, late 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

IX (Sea Unicorn) card from tarok pack, woodcut, German, late 19th century (IMage from The British Museum);

XIV, XV, XVI, XIX cards from tarok pack, woodcuts pub. by Johan Norbert Hofmann, German, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

19, 20 cards from Das Spiel der Hoffnung, etchings pub. by GPJ Bieling, German, 1800-50 (Image from The British Museum);

3 (10 of Spades) card from a Lenormand deck, ca. 1890 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

33 (Success, key) card from Wahrsagekarten Lenormand deck, color lithograph pub. by Ch. Didot, French, ca. 1890 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

48 (Amour), 1 (Etteilla) cards from Etteilla deck designed by Jean-Baptise Alliette (aka Etteilla), ca. 1840-90 (Image from WaiteSmith.org).]

Cards as Block Prints

         Playing cards have a history as long as paper, but they have a particularly synergistic relationship with block printing, which is what makes them my focus here.  Cards and card games were most likely invented in China in the 9th century, directly pushed by woodblock printing technology.  As long as game pieces were made of stones, bones, or even ivory tiles there was a limit to how much information could be included on each piece, or how standardized they could be.  It was the invention of paper in China that allowed elaborate pictures, numbers, words, and so on to be included on each card.  Of course, the more information and the more elaborate the images, the more work it was to create each card by hand, which is why it was then the invention of printing that really allowed cards and card games to take off.  Cards may have been one of the earliest things to be printed.  In Europe, too, it was the establishment of paper mills in Europe in the fourteenth century, followed by wood block printing in the early fifteenth century, that helped spread cards more widely there.

        I’m not here to give you a history of playing cards, which is very complicated.  I’m mostly ignoring the development of suits and their many variations in different countries over time, face cards and their variations, different packs with different designs for different games, and on and on.  For now all I’m looking at is the printmaking.  The problem with playing cards as opposed to “art,” however, is that they are often undated, and they’re used hard and treated as somewhat disposable.  I have a few printed cards from China for you ranging from about 1400 to the late-19th century.

        Playing cards appeared in Europe by the late 1300s, but their route there is a little murky.  We can guess that they travelled to Europe with traders, crusaders, and invaders, very likely by way of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt.  By the 1400s there were sermons condemning gambling at cards.  Here are some early wood block printed cards, from the 15th and 16th centuries, and you can see already that we’ve got a range of artistic quality, and also a range of personalities depicted, including an archer who’s clearly influenced by Islamic fashion, as well as Judith, Juno, Helen, Paris, and Lancelot.

        Playing cards arrived in Europe from the south, but it’s in Germany that the synergy between printing and playing cards took off.  The German printers had developed their techniques by printing religious pictures and indulgences, which led to their ability to make superior playing cards, which was a huge part of the printing boom, which led to ever wider popularity of cards, and so on, in a cycle that I’d call virtuous if it weren’t for the sermons.  At this stage most cards were hand colored after printing, sometimes using stencils.  For my next selection of pictures I’ve got a variety of face cards, including King of Hearts and Queen of Clubs (aka Hecuba), but also another Queen whose suit I don’t know because this is the black ink only and her red color will need to be added later.  Then there’s also the King and Ober of Acorns, and what I think is the Fool from the section of a deck that melds with what we know as the tarot… but more on that later.  While the king and the un-suited queen have iconography that’s similar to modern decks of cards, the others are quite different.

        Speaking of the unfamiliar suits (unfamiliar to English card players), many of the earlier decks had fun little pictures on all the cards, not just the “face cards,” and those pictures were by no means standardized.  I give you here three different versions of the 2 of Bells, two versions of the 7 of Leaves, and an Ace of Swords.  The fact that the Ace is a dragon apparently tells you that this one was made for the Portuguese market.  Each of these is a fun miniature block print in its own right, and while some are cruder than others, they all have a certain charm.  Nowadays most number (pip) cards are pretty boring, except when artists decide to make a statement.  To see the art deck created by one of my own classes of sixth graders, check out this prior post: Playing with a Full Deck.

        It was also the block printing process that gave us the innovation of dividing the suits into two red and two black, which simplified the printing and coloring, especially for the pip cards.  The French came up with that, which moved them to the forefront of playing card production.  They also contributed to standardization of design by requiring each region to have a certain amount of standardization for taxation purposes.  Taxation is also why card decks printed in England had elaborate Ace of Spades cards: that was the card that proved the tax had been paid to the Crown.

        In 1835 an American manufacturer invented a machine that could print all 4 colors at once, and by around 1860 double-ended card designs appeared.  Another innovation was designs with the card identification at the edges or corners so that they could be held in a tight fan.  Nowadays a standard deck of cards is completely standardized, although there are lots of novelty decks with every imaginable theme from birds of the world to Game of Thrones.  But with the invention of other methods of reproduction (engraving, lithography, photography…), the symbiotic relationship between playing cards and relief printmaking was severed.  Despite that, my own exploration of cards is not yet complete, because playing cards not only have a long history intertwined with block printing, they also have a long history intertwined with fantasy.  Tune in next time to learn about that.

[Pictures: Chinese playing card, woodcut, ca. 1400 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Khanhoo variety playing cards, wood block print, China, 1644-1896 (Image from The British Museum);

Kuanpai game cards, woodblock print and color, China, late 19th c. (Image from Brooklyn Museum);

French playing cards, woodcut with color, ca. 1495 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

Early French court cards, woodcut, ca. 1495 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

Early Rouen court cards, hand colored woodcut, ca. 1500 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

Deutsche Spielkarte, hand colored woodcut, Germany, 16th century (Image from Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg);

King of Hearts, woodblock print with color, 1793-4 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Queen of Clubs, woodblock print with color, 1672-98 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Queen, woodcut, Britain, late 17th c. (Image from The British Museum);

Fool, woodblock print with color, Germany, 1775-99 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Ober and King of Acorns, hand-coloured woodcut, Germany, late 18th c. (Image from The British Museum);

Two of Bells, engraving and stencilling, Germany, ca. 1810 (Image from Yale Beinecke Library);

Two of Bells and Seven of Leaves, woodcut, Germany, 1800-25 (Image from The British Museum);

Two of Bells, wood block and stencil, Germany, 1780-1800 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

Seven of Leaves, hand-coloured woodcut, Germany, 19th century (Image from The British Museum);

Ace of Swords, woodcut, made in Germany for the Portuguese market, before 1896 (Image from The British Museum);

Knave of possibly Spades, woodcut, France, before 1896 (Image from The British Museum);

Queen of Spades, woodcut and stencil, France, 1890 (Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France);

King of Diamonds in advertisement, wood engraving, Britain, 1886 (Image from The British Museum).]