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1:26pm on Thursday, 3rd November, 2022:

Toy Cards

Anecdote

I bought some cards off eBay this week. They're very unusual.



According to the Ace of Spades, they're made by a company called March. I've never heard of a card manufacturer called March, and neither have any of the card-specialist web sites I frequent. They could have been made by a regular printing company, but I haven't been able to find one: the problem with looking for the word "March" on the Internet is that it's everywhere because of the month.

These are "toy cards" (they measure 1.25 inches wide by 1.75 inches long), which were a thing back in the day — it just means they were smaller, not that they were for playing with as toys. They show full-length courts, rather than the doubled ones we have nowadays, and they have been cut from a single sheet of woodblock-printed card — you can see the lines they were cut along in places, such as the left edge of the King of Hearts. They only use two colours of ink, black and red, so they were made on the cheap.

That Ace of Spades is a problem.

In the UK, cards were taxed. They were stamped by the tax office 1712-1765, then the Ace of Spades itself became the proof that tax had been paid. Aces were printed by the tax office to a standard pattern like banknotes, except with the name of the individual manufacturer beneath. The aces were not hard to forge, and because the taxes were so high (a pack that cost ½d to manufacture needed a 6d tax stamo) they were indeed frequently forged. Duty got as high as 2/6 in 1928, so to deter forgeries the tax was reduced and a new, very elaborate ace ("Old Frizzle") was produced by the tax office. This was in use until 1862, when the box were wrapped in tax wrappers instead, but people had grown fond of fancy Aces of Spades so manufacturers kept making them to their own designs.

So, the pack I bought doesn't have a tax stamp on the Ace of Spades, or indeed anywhere else. That would suggest it dates from after 1862. The thing is, though, that it uses full-length court cards, which came in in the 1860s. That's a very small time window. Also, they're woodblock-printed, which was no longer financially viable in the 1860s. I suppose if someone had some woodblocks and wanted to make cards dirt cheap then they may have kept on using them, but that means the cards would be from an earlier era. If you were making your own woodblocks and stencils in the 1860s, you'd have made them double-ended.

They have no corner indices, but that's not a surprise because double-ended cards came in before indices did. This brings us, though, to the most unusual thing about this pack.

So: historically, the pips on the court cards appeared where there was space. For most of these, that was on the left, but for six it was on the right: the Jack and Queen of Diamonds; the Queen of Spades; the Jack and Queen of Clubs; the Jack of Hearts. In the 1860s, to make it easier to see what cards you were holding without giving away the fact that they were courts, the six cards with the pips on the right were turned so the pips were on the left. We therefore see two kinds of double-ended courts in this era: the unturned ones and the turned ones.

Now my pack isn't double-ended, so of course it won't be turned. However, look at the King of Diamonds: his pip is to the right. The King of Diamonds should not have a pip on the right. None of the other packs of playing cards I possess have the King of Diamonds with a pip to the right. You occasionally see modern, designer packs with the pip there (because with indices, it doesn't matter where the pip is) bbut you don't see historical ones with the pip there. I've no idea what's going on here.

The artwork on the cards looks better than it did in the early 1800s, when the picture cards had weirdly big eyes, so at a guess I'd say that the pack was made very quickly when Old Frizzle was discontinued; either that, or it's from a few decades and was made illegally because it was a small pack and the duty aces didn't come in it size.

I'm sure a proper expert could tell me in an instant what its provenance was, but I don't know any proper experts....




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