The long history of the playing cards,
which keep men stuck at a table
for the mere sake of risk.

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Card games aside, with the card pack the gypsy foretells the future, the magician carries on his show, the educator teaches, the psychologist applies tests. There is the 40-card deck, in which the value of the joker is higher than the one of the queen; and there is the 52-card deck, which is the most common one. Statistics state that three quarters of mankind use some kind of card packs for some purpose. But, how did it all begin?
Well, make your bets.

In order to know where the deck of cards was created, pick a card: the Chinese emperor, the Egyptian pharaoh, the Arabian sheik or the Indian maharaja. Now, to know how the deck reached Europe, pick another card from these three others: the Saracen warrior, the Crusaders or the Gypsy wanderer. Very well! So, whatever cards you picked, you must know that you were right, because the deck has come up from different forms, at different times and cultures. And it also reached Europe through different hands. It might have beem invented in China, to please one of the emperor Sehun-Ho's girlfriends, according to old Chinese texts. But there is no unanimity about that. The English author T. F. Carter, in his book "The Invention of Printing in China", published in 1925, refers to card games as being played in the year 969 to foretell the future.

If, on the one hand, there is no consensus about those dates, on the other hand there is little doubt about the religious or divinatory past of the cards. The old Indian deck, for instance, had ten suits, each of them representing one of the ten incarnations of the entity Vishnu. This connection with the supernatural is also clear when we analyze some historical data. Catherine P. Hargrave, in her "History of Card Games", published in 1930, states that in the fourteenth century, the Saracen soldiers introduced a card game in Italy, named "naib"- which means "witchcraft" in Hebrew - and which could also be the origin of the world "naipe" (suit) in Portuguese and Spanish.

Whether its origins are religious or not, when the deck of cards reached Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the pleasure of playing cards was already in place. The bets made on dice games (made of stone or bones) were know in many countries. The deck would come to add up to the previous games, conquering aficionados, certainly because of its enchantment which is still the same in our time, together with the almost infinite number of possible mathematical combinations found in a single deck of cards, in a pocket size case.

From the East, either from China or India, the decks reached Europe numbered and divided into suits. We know that there were 56 cards with four figures: the king, the queen, the knight and the servant. The other cards were numbered from one to ten and the suits were already four, as we have in current decks, inspired by the four Chinese suits, instead of the ten Indian ones.

Then, the first deck of cards produced in Europe was manufactured in Italy: the Tarot. They were (and still are) 22 cards, of which 21 are numbered with Roman numbers, which represent natural forces, vices and virtues of mankind. The 22nd card, "il matto" ('the crazy one", in Italian), represented freedom, did not have a number and originated the current joker. Between 1300 and 1400, adding the 56 cards of the Asian deck to the 22 of the Tarot deck, the Europeans started to play with a 78-card decks, very popular at that time, called Tarocchi in Italy, Tarau in France and Tarok in Germany.

During its first years, the deck was a pastime for few people: the figures were hand drawn and painted, which made it extremely expensive. However, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the xylographs started to reduce its production costs, after realizing that their largest market was concentrated in the printing and trading of decks, which were becoming ever more popular. The suits were standardized into clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades in France, Italy and Spain, except in Germany: there the suits were leaves, hearts, bells and acorns. Then came up the Spanish and the Italian decks, both with 40 cards, which are used today in Brazil to play truco or escopa. There also came up the German decks, with 36 or 32 cards (from 7 to the ACE, including the figures), which is the same deck used to play poker in Brazil, as opposed to the whole deck used in the United States.

Due to its own mystical origins, it would only be natural that the deck were involved in a lot of superstition - superstition, for instance, which makes a player who lost a game using brand new cards demand to go back to the game using the old ones. Another concern of the players was about security; in order to prevent frauds or "thefts", the manufacturers did not dare to change much the back of the cards.

Maybe this kind of feeling has prevented a bigger evolution in the design of decks. Afraid of shunning their suspicious customers with too many innovations, card manufacturers remained extremely conservative in their pictures of kings, queens and jokers. However, in this century we observed a boom of national heroes, naked women, attempts to include a modern design, historical and movie characters and even some experiments of high artistic quality were included in the decks. A deck branded Europa, manufactured in Spain in this decade, thoroughly recovers the apparel worn in the Renaissance days, and it comes with a leaflet written by the master of the Superior School of Fine Arts in Madrid, Professor Teodoro Miciano, explaining the clothes (different from each of the twelve figures) and its details. In the former Soviet Union, they tried to substitute the jokers, queens and kings for heroes of the 1917 Revolution, unsuccessfully.

Anyway, the deck has become an excellent business even for governments. In Spain and France, for instance, the manufacturing was once a state monopoly. The tentacles of the State have even influenced the design of the decks themselves - England, which up to 1828 charged half a crown of tax (a lot of money at that time) per deck sold, demanded that the seal proving the payment of the tax be stamped in the ACE of spades; this generated a tradition in which, although the tax no longer exists, the ace of spades receives the brand of the manufacturer or any other stamp which differentiates it from all the other cards. Today, the deck is considered much more a family entertainment than a betting tool - from bridge to rouba-monte, from rummy to truco.

The history of playing cards

The first cards in England

It is quite possible that playing cards were brought to England in the second half of the 15th century by merchants and sailors from Italy, Spain and the Netherlands who carried out their trade in the English ports. This belief is supported by the fact that there are no records of the arrival of playing cards in Great Britain dating from earlier years.

Since then, people began to import playing cards and soon their use was widely spread, even after such imports were prohibited. People kept on playing cards notwithstanding, including royalty, whose fancy garments are shown on the cards after the first half of the 16th century.

It is estimated that 500 thousand decks were sold in England during the first half of the 17th century, even after card playing and dicing were prohibited by Henry VIII as a consequence of having become a source of conflict among soldiers while playing.

In the 18th century, British government levied taxes upon playing cards for the first time.

The Game of Ombre

The Spanish game of Ombre was one of the first games to introduce bidding, through which one player becomes the declarer, trying to make a contract, with the other players cooperating to prevent him from doing so. Card games such as the Tresillo (or voltarete, as it is called in Portugal), the Tarot, the Skat, Boston, and Bridge have their current bidding derived from the Ombre game.
In the game of bridge, an interesting circumstance occurs: two partnerships of 2 players each try to get for themselves the best contract (4-player game). Once this is accomplished, one of the winning partnership players “dies” and the remaining player – the declarer – plays against the opposing partnership to prevent it from making the contract (a 3-player game).
Another example of the popularity and influence of the ombre game across English culture and tradition is the names of the black suits on the English cards: spades and clubs, which derive from Spanish cards (espadas and bastos, respectively) and have no relationship whatsoever with the pictures on the pertinent cards – arrows and three-leaf clovers.

The Production of Playing Cards

The first playing cards were hand-made, as evidenced in many decks in specific museums around the world.
Because such cards were thoroughly hand-made, they were regarded as valuable and sensitive goods. Notwithstanding the laws prohibiting card playing all over Europe, card games were quickly adopted by all social classes, which led to the need of an increased playing card production to meet the booming demand.

In order to mass-produce playing cards, the colors were directly applied on the cards regardless of the drawing limits. This led to the use of stencils, which was invented in the early 15th century, and these were engraved or cut patterns. Each card had a stencil for the basic drawing and other for its several colors, which were applied by means of paintbrushes especially designed for this type of work.

At a later stage, printing techniques are first applied by means of woodcuts and then applying stencils on such printed paper for later coloring.

"Woodcut" is a method of printing or engraving upon wood in which an image is carved into the surface of a piece of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed. The final image, called engraving, is the outcome of the wood engraving.

Originally it was used to stamp fabric, but it quickly spread across the West after the invention of paper by the Chinese.

The idea of employing movable types (that is, separate characters) to print came with the printing of texts, as it was possible to rearrange and reuse such types to print other pages instead of performing a unique engraving for each individual page. This is how the Press was invented.

Such operations originally consisted of manually pressing a previously damp sheet of paper, and later screw presses were employed.

Subsequently the colors were applied; such work required the craftsmen to use stencils (engraved or cut patterns) and dies to print their names or the manufacturer brand, on the deck cases.

Lithography is another printing process based on the on the mutual repulsion of oil and water, that is, greasy substances and water do not mingle. The drawing is made on a stone (lithography stone) or on a metal plate (usually a zinc plate) with an oil-based medium. Next, the surface of the stone or plate untouched by grease is desensitized to it, and the portions drawn upon are fixed against spreading by treatment with a gum Arabic and nitric acid solution. The nitric acid allows the grease to penetrate the stone, while the Arabic gum fixes the drawing.

The drawing accepts the greasy printing ink and rejects the water; this is why a roll with greasy printing ink is applied on it; when the stone is damped with a sponge, and the ink adheres only to the drawing, not to the stone’s remaining wet parts. This is a complex process that requires skilled people to work on it, but it is paid off by its good results, since the original drawing is fully copied.

The lithography stone was replaced by metal plates just before it was put aside as a printing procedure and was eventually dismissed with the introduction of photomechanical processes. Today it is only used as an industrial process.

The Cardmaker’s work

The artisan who made playing cards was either a printer or a painter; he was personally in charge of printing and coloring individual items, since both tasks were regarded as essential to assure the quality of playing card production.

Additional activities to the playing cards production process, such as preparing and gluing paper, cutting and weighting cards, preparing colors and inks, etc, were performed by the artisan’s family members, apprentices or paid workers.

Before getting the status of card maker, it was necessary to go through a 3-year learning period as a master card maker apprentice. During this period the apprentice lived in the master’s house and was in charge of blending colors, stretching and drying the 3 sheets of paper used to make cards after glued to one another, and cleaning tools after use.

Upon completion of the training period, there was an additional 3 to 6-year period when the apprentice worked as a card maker. In order to obtain his status as a card master, it was essential for the apprentice to go through a 3-year-learning period with a certified master card maker, and also submit to the "keepers” of playing card craftsmanship a work of art by his own in order to have his skills and talent reviewed.

Such reviews were conducted according to the kinship level between apprentice and master, thus it was easier for sons of card masters to be approved.

Finally, after the reviews were completed, if the apprentice was granted the status of master card maker, it was customary to offer the evaluators refreshments, such as a light meal or a drink.