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 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 seventh 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).]