Hi I just acquired what I think is a very nice deck - for the US Army and clearly issued during wartime as there is a paper slip advertising war bonds. Pack is high quality with gold edging. Made by USPC Co. with a congress card (but not 'Congress' on the AS). The file scan shows the main details.
Does anyone have any info (?date) for example were these sent out to troops?
Thanks in advance
Paul
The design is consistent with the 1940s and the war bonds ad card would certainly indicate a WW2-era deck. "E" in the Ace of Spades code would narrow that down to having been manufactured in 1943, right in the thick of the war. USPC was very busy at the time - manufacturing regular decks, spotter decks with ships and aircraft pictures, parachutes for the war effort and their "escape decks," designed for shipment in Red Cross packages to POWs in Europe - as you likely know, when the cards were moistened, the glue would dissolve and the two paper layers would reveal a segment of an escape map hidden inside. Lots of interesting secret shipments of escape-related supplies went out like this - I remember reading a story about a POW accidentally breaking a phonograph record from a Red Cross shipment to find that European paper currency had been hidden in the core of the acetate!
Obviously I can't say this with certainty, but it's very likely that this particular deck was never sent out to the troops. Decks sold to US servicemen during World War II were issued special stamps indicating that they were tax-free, whereas this deck has an IRS revenue stamp (a.k.a. tax stamp) with a USPC cancellation. It was probably sold domestically to civilians looking for a patriotic-looking pack of cards or perhaps manufactured for the US Army and intended for sale to civilians.
As I understand it, most of the intellectual property associated with the US Federal Government is in the public domain as regarding objects, places, things, etc. made with American tax dollars. For example, while specific government documents might be restricted, government-related intellectual property such as the White House, the American Flag, NASA, the US Constitution, the FBI, the Presidential Seal of Office, Air Force One, the Space Shuttle, Marine One, the statue depicting the flag planting at Iwo Jima, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, etc. would be considered public domain - as long as I didn't use them to imply any sort of official recognition or endorsement without permission or use them for committing some kind of fraud (such as suggesting the government gave me permission to use the "US Army" deck to raise money for war bonds), I could use photos or other images of these things and place them on objects I want to sell. My point is that any civilian could have ordered such a deck to be made for retail sale; they may or may not be something officially ordered for manufacture by the US Army or any branch of the government. I would also not be able to use images of specific individuals without permission - meaning faces of government employees, present and past, would be off-limits for reproduction and sale for privacy reasons unless taken in the context of news reporting or for personal use. For example, I can take a souvenir photo of the President having a cup of coffee at the local coffeehouse, I can sell the photo to a news service for use in their reporting on an event involving the President (such as the coffee house visit, some other thing he's in the news for, a biographical piece, etc.), but I can't make a T-shirt or a coffee mug with that image and go selling it - though if I made a small quantity for myself and my immediate family to use personally, perhaps even give away without charge a small number to friends and other people that I know, that would be permissible.
