I'm working with a journal aimed at conservators and curators on producing a suggested an article that contains a list of suggested data to collect on playing cards. For example, many older collections fail to list the provenance of playing cards. Photographs are always face on and the backs are frequently disregarded. In the oldest playing cards information regarding watermarks is often disregarded.
So, as the title says, when you're looking at playing card entries in museums/online collections, what information do you wish had been collected and reported?
Let's see what I can think of...
Maker
Brand Name
Specific Model
Period of Manufacture of Said Model
Date of Manufacture of this Specific Model (or closest possible estimate)
Size of specific print run (if available) and overall number of decks made in this make/model
Producer, if made for a third party by the printer
Artist(s)
Condition of Cards, with notations of any specific wear and tear or manufacturing defects
Completeness of deck - are the jokers/ad cards/deck seal/tax stamp/tuckbox/interior wrapper/exterior wrapper/wax seal included and/or intact? How close or far is it to factory-original condition?
Special features - were the cards translucent with hidden images between the layers of paper? Was the deck marked or otherwise altered for either magic or dishonest gambling? Was the deck gilded? Did it have special packaging? Was it a limited edition? If so, was the limited edition serially-numbered? If so, what number is this one?
These are among the many wondrous things collectors would love to know about their decks. However, most of this information is rarely if ever available, especially for vintage and antique decks. In the earliest days of playing cards, record keeping wasn't the highest priority for card makers - even today there are only spotty records of print runs from anything predating the digital age. As cards became cheaper to make, they started being treated as ephemera - objects to be consumed until no longer useful, then disposed of. As such, detailed information as mentioned above was often not considered all that important for long-term record keeping. It's like asking the makers of Kleenex about the date of manufacture of a specific, vintage box of tissues, or asking Mead about when a particular vintage composition book was produced. There's a chance they can guess at the time period within some number of years based on certain design features, assuming they kept photographic records or physical examples of their older products (which is not impossible but also not likely), but the odds they can tell you with any real degree of accuracy and certainty are nearly nil. USPC used to have all kinds of information about their older work, but with the changes of ownership and greater concern for profitability than history, much of that information has been lost and what little remains is poorly if at all indexed in any useful way. They're a company that was making a product to make money - the original owners might have cared about the history, but over time and with each change of owners, profit was far more important and history was largely ignored. I can't say this is really all that wrong, in terms of that's why companies exist - to make a profit - but it's a shame that history gets lost in this way.
Provenance of a deck would be nice, but unless it was owned by someone particularly famous, it's probably thought of as optional to most people. People might consider the provenance of an original work of art as important, but original works of art are unique while playing cards are mass-produced and generally considered close enough to identical to each other within a print run. It's like owning the copy of the famous Farah Fawcett-Majors swimsuit poster released in September 1976 that was once owned by Lee Majors. There's little to nothing to prove this provenance unless Lee Majors himself provided a letter of authenticity to go with it, and unless Lee Majors also added some distinguishing markings to his poster, there's absolutely nothing else about this specific poster that differentiates it from the 12,000,000+ others that were made - it still holds the record for largest quantity made of a pin-up poster.
Meanwhile, USPC started making 1,600 decks a day in 1881, or somewhere short of 400,000 a year if you account for factory downtime and five-day workweeks - today, they make 100,000,000 decks a year. Today, we can pinpoint a standard USPC deck to the week of manufacture from its production code on the Ace of Spades. If a given deck made in a given week this year was owned by a famous magician and he signed a letter to that effect, how would you differentiate that one specific deck from the several thousand others that were made in that same production run on that same week? If I swapped that deck for one of the others in the same print run, how would anyone be able to tell the difference, if the magician didn't do something to the deck that made it unique from the several thousand others made during the same print run?
Now consider that before 2009, the best you could figure from the production code was the year, and prior to 1904, no production codes were used at all. Even within the period that codes were used, they weren't always used consistently to indicate the year a deck was made. If the standard USPC deck in question in the previous paragraph was a vintage deck from the middle of the twentieth century, it becomes much harder to pinpoint a specific deck's time of creation, thus making it easier to swap out a similar-looking deck for it without anyone being able to tell the difference, unless the famous former owner did something to that deck to make it unique from all the others. And he'd have to do something to EACH of the cards in the deck, as well as the tuck box, in order to make these specific elements unique and thus different from all the other ones that look identical to it - and only the Ace of Spades and the ad cards bore any specific indicators of when they were made - for the other, it's simply when cards bearing the design of that face and that back were being produced, making them impossible to pinpoint without unique added markings.
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