Card Patents from 1800s - National Playing Card Company

[JohnEdelson]

I have an old deck known in Hochman, NU13. P113. It's a National Playing Card Company deck with three Palmer Cox Brownies on the joker.

I think mine is NU13 since the Ace of Spades says "Full House", not "Boston".   In reading about it in Hochman, there is a mention of there being two versions of this ace of spades. One marked "patent pending", the second with the patent date.

On mine, the 1890 patent date is cited on the box. The ace has 96 as the code. The joker has j84. There's no mention of a patent pending.


My deck:



First question, does anyone know how to find the patent that was granted? I have searched a number of ways on the US Patent database but not found anything relevant. 
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.html





I have several different versions of this joker, the others are later, perhaps Hochman 13a since they have the US corner indices.





The Second Question is more obscure. Does anyone have any idea about the intellectual property or royalty arrangement between Palmer Cox and the National Playing Card Company? Would Palmer Cox have allowed his characters to be used free by National on this and the other National Jokers such as NU18a and NU10a?


Has anyone researched this?


I have a similar royalty question on all the early Congress606 decks which used famous artwork, much of contemporary at that point, on the backs of their cards (and on the jokers in the Matching Decks). They had Dundreary on their joker for around two decades. Was all of this royalty free? Did it fall somehow under "Fair Use"? Was there any sort of agreement?

[Worst Bower]

I can answer some of your questions. The Full House deck was released around April 1895 for draw poker. These are the cards with "patent applied for" on them. It wasn't until the following year that it got patented.

60-card poker basically died out around 1897 so there was lots of unsold stock. USPCC tried to sell the decks for other games in their 1898 official rules book. The game of Five Hundred seems to have been first published by the USPCC in 1899. I could not find the original rules but I suspect they were played with just 52 cards plus the joker. In 1904, USPCC released another book on Five Hundred. I think this is when "500" branded decks were released because the earliest mention of six-handed Five Hundred games being played that I could find are from 1905. Hochman says the deck expanded with the red 13s in the mid-1920s but I couldn't pin down an exact year.

I've attached the 1895 patent  copyright card from the virtual card catalog here:

[JohnEdelson]

This is incredible information. Thanks.
It'll take me awhile to think about this and to follow up with the "Virtual Card Catalog" which I did not know anything about.

Right now, I'm just trying to understand the card and what it means.
Do you know exactly what was being patented? Was it the ace of spades? I would have thought the aces were just trademarked.
Also, is there any more info that can be retrieved about the patent?

Copyright Assignor: U.S. Playing Card Company - (New Jersey)

Full house poker playing cards, no. 555
Spanish cards, no. 95.
Trophy whist playing cards
New poker deck, National Meth (rev) dup, whist
Assigned to | U.S. Playing Card Company - (Ohil).
Original proprietor | U.S. Playing Card Company.
Original entry | 1895: No, 65923 _ 5927, inv.
Assignment recorded | Assignment book v 78 p. 9,

[Worst Bower]

Sorry, the VCC is for copyrights. I guess what was copyrighted was the brand name of the deck. What was patented were the Roman numeral indices for the extra cards as seen in the description tab in the Espacenet link.

USPCC couldn't patent the new ranks because they were previously patented by Isaac Levy of the NYCCC back in 1876. They did nothing with it and let it lapse into public domain.