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Chapter 9
PLAYING CARDS
It seems very likely that playing cards were in use in China and India centuries before they appeared in Europe, where the first reference to them is said to have been in the year 1299. In Italy the earliest packs were 'Tarot' cards consisting of twenty-two cards of allegorical designs used for fortune telling which later were combined with Oriental cards to make a set of seventy-eight, on which the game of 'Tarrochi' was based. In England it is known that the use of cards was well established in 1463, when an Act of Parliament banned their importation from the Continent.
As might be expected, engravers and printers found great scope for their skills in the production of playing cards. One of the most noted, an anonymous German artist known as the 'Master of the Playing Cards', produced splendid sets, line engraved, in the years 1430 to 1450 and, in Italy, some of the earliest copperplate engravings were used for sets of Tarrochi cards; it is quite likely that the engravers of these sets also prepared the plates for the Ptolemaic maps issued in Rome in 1478.
W. REDMAYNE Example of playing card showing the County of Gloucestershire issued in 1676
In the sixteenth century the pack of fifty-two cards, introduced in France, became the accepted standard and in times when there was little or no organized schooling they were widely used for educational purposes and were illustrated with texts on a great variety of subjects. It was natural, therefore, to find among the beautifully illustrated cards produced in the days of the first Queen Elizabeth sets of cards showing a map of the British Isles and the counties of England and Wales. The earliest surviving packs of this type were published in 1590 and although their authorship is not known for certain they are attributed to a William Bowes. The maps depicted on them were evidently copies from Saxton's famous Atlas of 1579 and possibly were engraved by William Kip or Pieter van den Keere, noted map engravers of the period. By a fortunate coincidence there are fifty-two counties in England and Wales and the maps were so arranged in the 1590 pack that in any suit the smallest county is No 1 and the largest XIII. Each card is divided into three parts showing the county name, the map and brief details. In spite of their small size each map shows the principal places in the county, identified by initial letters. There are only three packs of the 1590 cards known, with a further one dated 1605. It is thought that the maps drawn for these cards formed the basis for one of the first pocket atlases, producing in 1635 by Matthew Simmons, a London bookseller and printer who published many of Milton's works.
ROBERT MORDEN Examples of playing cards issued in 1676. Published by Robert Morden and William Berry.
Later, in 1676, Robert Morden, who subsequently published. notable atlases, produced a pack of cards in very similar form, the upper portion showing the suit, stencilled bv hand, the title of the map and the designation of the card; the centre portion consisted of a sketch map and the lower panel, the dimensions of the county. Each 'King' is indicated by a portrait of King Charles II in a circle and the 'Queen' by the head of his Queen, Catherine of Braganza. The Northern counties are represented by Clubs, the Eastern by Hearts, the Southern by Diamonds and the Welsh counties by Spades. In spite of limitations of size these maps were among the first to give an indication of the main roads in each county, no doubt being inspired by John Ogilby's 'strip' road maps published in the previous year. There was a second issue in 1676 and further issues in i68o and 1770 showing additional towns and roads. Also in 1676 another pack of cards was compiled by W. Redmayne, presumably in competition with Morden, and they are now equally scarce. In the next century a set in similar style, probably based on Redmayne's, was printed c. 1711 by John Lenthall who, as a publisher and stationer, rather than an original engraver, produced packs of cards of all types based on the work of many other designers.
All English sets and those published on the Continent, of which one by Pierre Duval, Les Tables de Geographie c. 1667, is a good example, are now very scarce indeed and will be found only by the most dedicated collector.