US1 Tigers # 101

[tobyedwards]

The first photo is of an extra card included in an early deck of US1 Tigers brand cards that I wondered if anyone had ever seen before.
Given that the Ace of Spades was generic and the joker only depicts a tiger without spelling out the brand name, the question then becomes, could this be one of, if not the first, title card for a deck of cards? This card has the standard Blue Star back design, later known as Blue Old Style Star.


The second photo is of an unusual back design consisting of suit signs which appears on a different deck of US1 Tigers brand cards. 
Can anyone identify the actual name of this particular pattern?

[Eddie Hughlett]

I have no answer regarding the name of the back pattern on the second picture above, but I believe that design is a great candidate for a revival. It is already one way and could easily made into a marked deck in several ways. I personally like it very much.

[Don Boyer]

It's possible, sure, that it could be as you say, a "title card" for the deck and the first example of its kind.  I do recall Tigers was meant to be an inexpensively-produced, cheaply-priced deck for mass consumption.

The thing is, about stuff like "title cards" or extra cards of any kind, is that unless we have definitive proof of their existence, like a printing plate, a photograph, a mention in a non-fiction book on the topic or an actual example, we can't say with any degree of accuracy whether or not such cards existed on earlier decks.  Why?  For the same reasons that a lot of modern decks found in people's homes are lacking ad cards and jokers - they were often not used by the players who bought them, so many people discarded them not long after opening the deck and using it for the first time.  Any documentation of such cards might for similar reasons not have survived this long, as much of the printed literature of previous centuries was considered ephemera, not built to last, and treated as such.

It's similar to the conundrum of the motion picture, when it comes to history.  There were many early examples of incredible filmmaking and story-telling that simply no longer exist today because they weren't considered documents of their time, but rather looked upon as disposable entertainments.  And I'm not even talking about ancient history - the British TV show "Doctor Who" is considered practically an institution among Brits and has fans the world over, yet many of the earliest episodes no longer survive today, having been destroyed intentionally (due to the erasure and re-use of video tapes and lack of archival space).  No one thought, when these shows were first created, that people 50 years later would be eager to see them, and no one thought to treat them with a historical perspective.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes for more information.

So, for example, some earlier deck in the US or perhaps England or France might have had a "title card," but because few of the decks survived to this date and none of those examples had title cards, we can't say for sure one way or another, lacking other corroborating evidence.  The best one could say would be "it's the earliest KNOWN example of such a feature," but that's it - earlier ones might have existed and both those cards and any documentation or other evidence about them simply did not survive this long.