Playing Cards

In my earlier post, Early 20th Century French Playing Cards, I spoke about some of the characteristics of French playing cards, from the early 20th century. In this post, I would like to describe some of the characteristics of 19th century French cards. The purpose of this post is to share some of the information that I know, to help collectors. Here are a couple of 19th century French decks, from my own collection. marked cards

The basic designs of the cards are the same as the early 20th century decks, known as Portrait Officiel. The most noticeable difference between late 19th century and early 20th century French playing cards is the absence of corner indices, from the decks that were made before the 1890s. The corner indices were actually an American invention that first appeared in the 1870s, but European makers did not start copying the idea right away. So, if you ever see an antique French deck of cards that has corner indices, you can be pretty sure that it does not predate the last decade of the 19th century.luminosu contact lenses

The other important detail is the tax stamp.

The two decks shown in the photograph both have a tax stamp on the ace of clubs. That indicates that these decks were produced in the late 19th century. Earlier French decks had no tax stamps because the cards were printed on watermark paper, which had to be purchased from the government. It should be noted that French decks continued to be printed on watermarked paper even after the introduction of the tax stamp on the ace of clubs.

During that era, French playing card makers didn't print their names on any of the cards. The names of the makers were only printed on the wrappers. Most wrappers got lost, so identifying the makers takes a bit more knowledge. I once stumbled across a French site that described the colors that various makers would use on the court cards, at certain times. The court cards were printed and then colored by hand. A good source of information would be any unused deck of cards that has survived to this day, with its wrapper intact. I happen to own two such decks and will be making a blog post about them at some later time.

In this post, I've described just some of the main characteristics of 19th century French playing cards. Of course, there are a lot more details that I did not mention and I wish to save them for another post. I also happen to own a counterfeit 19th century French deck, that I purchased knowing it was a fake. I will do a separate post about it and describe some additional characteristics of 19th century French cards.