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9:46am on Friday, 31st May, 2019:
Anecdote
I bought another pack of antique playing cards on eBay recently.
This one was cheap, because someone has written each card's index in the top-right corner and it's missing the 4C, 6C, 10D, 5D, AS, 5S and QS.
It's a 1910 edition Imperiales pattern by Josef Glanz. This company became part of Piatnik in 1912, so there weren't many Glanz decks published after this one.
The tax stamp doesn't appear in the go-to list of Austrian playing card tax stamps; it looks superficially like the one that was used from 1882 to 1899, but doesn't have a stamp number inside the eagle and does have a stand-alone rating value at the bottom (4, meaning the tax bracket for packs that are either laquered or washable which have more than 36 cards in them).
Interestingly, the written-on index numbers only work for left-handed people.
If you're interested in antique playing cards yourself and have more money than I do, there's a George II era deck by Hall & Son for sale on eBay currently at £83.81 with 36 minutes left to go before the auction ends.
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Copyright © 2019 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).