In the Cards

"I am sorry," Samuel Johnson once rumbled, "I have not learned to play at cards. It is very useful in life; it generates kindness, and consolidates society." Presumably he was thinking of picquet or bezique, rather than an all-night killer session at seven-card stud, but Johnson's point has been true for centuries. Yet no player today could guess, from his impersonal deck with its stiff, bright kings, queens and jacks, mass-produced and slippery for fast dealing, how complicated the ancestry of the modern playing card was--or how various and fine in craftsmanship. Discovering this is one of the pleasures of the Yale University Library's current show in New Haven, The Art of the Playing Card--a selection from more than 3,000 packs, uncut sheets and card printers' woodblocks acquired by the late Melbert and Mary Gary, and willed to Yale in 1967.

Like socks, cards wear out; if one is lost, a pack becomes useless; the mortality rate is high. That, in essence, is why so little is known about the early history of the playing card. Ancient specimens survive by accident. How cards were first introduced into Europe is not known. They may have been brought from China, where they had been used for gaming and fortunetelling since at least the 10th century. They may have migrated from the Middle East with returning Crusaders.

The division of the deck into four suits probably had origins in divination, as a reference to the four quarters of the world. But the four-suit deck is largely a Western convention: there are round Hindu cards with ten suits representing the ten incarnations of Vishnu, and some Persian decks had five--dancer, queen, soldier, king and lion (see opposite page, top left). In the classical fortuneteller's deck, the tarot, the suits were four: cups, swords, coins and batons. Each suit had 14 cards, with four court cards that included a knight. To this pack of 56 were added a further 22 divinatory images --the Tower, the Hanged Man, the Fool (who is the ancestor of the modern Joker) and so on. And from that basic deck evolved the standard 52-card French pattern of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs that has been used, with variants, ever since the early 15th century.

However the deck was codified, the materials and designs were not. Sheet silver cards appeared in Augsburg at the turn of the 17th century, made for Orthodox Jews whose religious laws forbade them to touch pasteboard decks at Passover. Silk and cotton or plaited straw were inlaid into the cards to reproduce gay theatrical costumes in their original fabric, like the 17th century Pulcinello opposite. The superb min-chiate (or tarot) cards done in the 15th century by Bonifacio Bembo for Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, are so elaborate in their detailed painting, embossment and gilding that they could seldom, if ever, have been used.

With the spread of printing came the card's democratization. Even the trade of cardmaking became a separate and honorable one; the pastiche costume for a earlier (opposite, lower right), armored in shingles of pasteboard and bearing his immense shears like a lance, reflects the new status of these jobbing printers. Cards were so much in demand that they became a useful way of disseminating ideas, skills and images that had nothing to do with gambling. By the 19th century, nearly any kind of information could turn up on the back: from portraits of George Washington to allegories of the Fall of the Bastille, from series of Famous Frauds to an adumbration of John Cage--in the form of a set of Viennese cards engraved with musical phrases which could be shuffled to produce random scores. Such material slowed the play; but how consoling to learn about how to carve game or serve a fish, from diagrams, while losing a rubber, or your shirt.

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