Thickness of Early Playing Cards

[variantventures]

I've been trying to gather more information about the thickness of early playing cards.  This is a crucial question when attempting to re-create early playing cards so I've gone to some effort.  I have contacted multiple museums and conservators and been fortunate enough to have some responses.  The Beinecke Library, in particular, was exceedingly helpful.  I am still in awe of the amount of work they did in response to my request.  Most of my requests are still outstanding but I hope to receive more responses this month.

The summary is: Playing cards were constructed of a smooth, white paper made from hemp and linen.  In early playing cards this paper was between 0.17mm-0.24mm thick with 0.19mm-0.22mm being the most common range.  This equates to a paper weight of approximately 199gsm (plus or minus a few grams).  Cards were constructed of multiple layers of cards, in most cases, which gives weights of 400gsm to 800gsm.  With modern cards being produced in a range of 290gsm to 320gsm you can see that early playing cards were much thicker.  As time went on card makers became more sophisticated and began producing cardstock using a thick (0.22mm to 0.26mm) paper for the core and thin paper (0.11mm) for the face and back.

An interesting note on this research is generated by the Morisca Cards held by the Fournier Museum.  This museum deserves some credit as they are, so far as I am aware, the first to take a thickness measurement of cards in their holdings and publish those measurements.  And those measurements are interesting because they reveal the Morisca cards are, at their thickest, 0.18mm thick.  This is, of course, nicely within the range of of other measurements.  What's interesting is that the Morisca Cards appear to have survived as cards rather than as portions of a binding.  That might indicate the Morisca cards were made from a single sheet of paper rather than from two or more sheets.  The provenance of this deck is unclear and I've written the museum requesting more information but have not, as yet, heard back.

I'll add more information as it becomes available.

[Don Boyer]

There are really no standards when it comes to the production of playing cards going back hundreds of years. Cards could vary not just in thickness but even in their size and design depending on what company was doing the manufacturing. Materials used could also vary from printer to printer.   Remember, the history of playing cards goes back, some people believe, to as far as the ninth century in China! That's well over 1,000 years of playing card history and standards didn't come into existence really until sometime during the late 19th or early 20th centuries. I've seen images of playing cards that were made of every material from thin paper to thick board and even slabs of precious metals such as silver or gold!

A few years back, I had the rare opportunity along with some other 52 Plus Joker members to view a portion of the Field collection in the library at Columbia University. I wrote an article about the trip a few months ago in CARD CULTURE Magazine, including several photos plus an online supplement with even more photos. You might consider joining 52 Plus Joker to look at that and several other articles in both CARD CULTURE and Clear the Decks, our two club magazines. Clear the Decks in particular has a very long history,  over 30 years in print, and covers antique and vintage playing cards very well.  Back issues are available through an online archive.

[Worst Bower]

The provenance of this deck is unclear and I've written the museum requesting more information but have not, as yet, heard back.

From http://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards77.htm:

Despite the museum's catalogue reference of this deck is Italy 2, it may come from anywhere within a wide area, now corresponding to Spain, northern Italy, southern France, Switzerland, and south-western Germany. It was found in Seville, and the only country where the same composition is used is Spain, but some scholars claim that the cap featured on the ace of Coins is consistent with a north-eastern Italian origin, while others identify the clothes worn by the courts as German.

Also http://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/:

The ranks are the same twelve as in later Portugese and Spanish cards, differing from the Italian and Mamluk ones in that the tens are lacking. If the tens were originally present, they must have been deliberately discarded during the decks's period of use, as the probability that all four tens accidentally should have been lost along with the eight other random missing cards is vanishingly small. Also, the elegant placement pattern of the suit symbols in cups and coins from the fives to nines (and probably even the lost fours) could not easily be extended to tens.

The museum calls it "Italy 2" despite being found in Seville and is most likely Spanish in origin since it lacks 10s. The backward facing knights resemble the knight of coins in the later Seville pattern. I would say that the evidence for a local production in Seville is far more convincing than it being a foreign import.

Here's what I took when I visited:

[variantventures]

I think A. Pollett's map showing the area (in yellow) where the deck might have originated is correct.  That border area between the large design traditions (Spain, Italy, France, Germany) was very fertile ground for design variety.  Neither her website nor Tor's discuss the immediate provenance of the cards, however.  They were found in Seville.  In a binding?  In a collection?  Under a floor?  If the cards were cut into cards, and not used in a binding or cut out of a damaged sheet, then the weight of the evidence would suggest these cards were printed on a single sheet of paper and were intended to be used this way.  That's a departure from the majority of other cards which were printed on multiple sheets of paper.

And I am seeing commonalities of both design and manufacture.  The Stukeley/Bohemian design, for instance, was pretty static for almost two hundred years.  We can see French designs that persisted for similar lengths of time.  And the evidence I am gathering is showing that paper weights were very consistent up until the 17th Century (when evidence is scare) and the 18th Century (when there's lots of evidence showing the changes made in the construction of card-stock).  Even the pigments used are demonstrating consistency.  Translucent yellow on the card?  That's almost certainly some variety of buckthorn berry.  There's a lot of variety in some of the details, granted.  But there are also a lot of broad similarities.

[Worst Bower]

Detlef Hoffmann was the first to describe the second deck on http://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/. It is Leinfelden Museum's B-1288. He wrote about it in Die Welt der Spielkarte (1972) and assigned it to 1545 Provence without providing a reason.

The Fournier Museum's Italia-2 was acquired after the book was published but I'm not sure when or how. While they got the cards from Seville, they labelled it Italian because the ace of coins shows a man wearing a Venetian cap. Its significance was only realized in the 1980s. Hoffmann claimed the courts wore Germanic fashions and was most likely printed near the Swiss border and exported to Spain.

Michael Dummett challenged Hoffmann's claims on both decks and said they were Spanish in origin. He believed them to be different stages of evolution of an early standard pattern. He also conjectured that the Wintle sheet (http://www.wopc.co.uk/spain/moorish/index) predates them both.

As for Pollett, he is a male, Andrea being Italian for Andrew. He hasn't published anything in almost 10 years and I fear he may have died.

[variantventures]

The Fournier Museum says they have no information on the provenance of the deck beyond the fact that it was acquired by the Musuem (actually Felix Fournier) in Seville in 1970.  Given the characteristics of this deck I'd say it's from the Provence-Languedoc regions.  It could be Catalan but I'd bet it's closer to Northern Italy because that region has a history of producing 'mixed' decks that exhibit characteristics from multiple regions.  The measured thickness of the cards, and the fact that they appear to have been a finished product that saw usage, is what currently intrigues me.

[variantventures]

I have updated the spreadsheet containing the raw data provided by the various institutions.  I am continuing to reach out to other institutions to enlarge the sample set.  Some of the reports provided have been quite terse while others have been voluminous (22 pages from the Beinecke Library).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iodWD7KGC4HCURkCo5kIkNM-m98s5VziN9KBAAPJhQ0