I liked seeing how the card bases were made, by hand, and then painted with skills passed down through the family line. Reminds me of pottery studios I visited in Europe where families had been producing beautiful wares for generations.
Annette 
It's very similar to how early European playing cards were made - hand-crafted by artisans, usually on commission of a wealthy patron, like a member of royalty or a merchant. I've even heard of decks being made out of precious metals like silver and gold instead of paper - they were displayed in the home instead of used for play, placed where visitors could see them as a show of conspicuous consumption to indicate (or inflate) one's perceived wealth, and by extension, their status. We don't start seeing anything even close to mass production of cards until post-Gutenberg; even then, playing cards were still considered luxury items until the Industrial Age caused an explosion of mass production and an increase in high-quality print work, in roughly the latter two or three decades of the 19th century.
And yet... in 1377 the city of Paris prohibited playing cards on workdays. The implication being that playing cards were available to enough of the working class to cause problems at work places. While Gutenberg invented movable type, wood-block printing had been around Europe for at least one hundred years. While this technique is laborious when producing reading material, it lends itself readily to playing cards. Evidence is thin but it appears that playing cards were being mass manufactured by the last quarter of the 14th century, a good fifty to sixty years before Gutenberg introduces movable type printing. And playing card production was quite sophisticated by the 17th Century. There's evidence for cards being treated with a protective coating that was also intended to make the cards smoother (soap) and being polished on marble slabs, for instance.
Playing cards were firmly established in the Islamic world by the 15th Century or earlier, if the dating of the De Unger and Madina card fragments are to be believed, but playing cards do not appear to have moved from hand production to mass production despite the fact the Islamic world was using paper and woodblock printing for hundreds of years before most of Europe. There is a lot of active speculation about the reasons for this and most of them tend to boil down to culture. As an indication, the Ottomans banned the printing of books in Arabic until the early 18th Century despite the fact that Sephardic Jews from Spain had brought movable type technology at the end of the the 15th century and been actively using it in Istanbul for two hundred years.
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