Book Description

If an apology is needed for writing again on the subject of playing cards, the excuse may be offered that new lights have been turned on the subject, so that there is fresh information to lay before the public, derived from a close and exhaustive study of the European libraries and museums, as well as of the pictures on the Playing Cards themselves or prints found in those repositories, and also in the collection owned by the writer; for these speak their histories to those who regard their symbols with appreciative knowledge, since they had an immense significance when originally adopted. It is twenty years since The Devil's Picture Book was published and it is now out of print. The writer has been frequently called upon to furnish papers on the subject, so that it has been kept fresh in mind. At the time that the first book was issued it was the only one that had been printed in the United States devoted entirely to the history of cards not necessarily connected with games. Since then little has been published on the subject, and the information given in the present volume has been largely derived from the writer's own observations and studies. A collection of Playing Cards, begun at that time with a solitary pack brought as a curiosity by a traveler from Algiers, that bore the ancient pips of Swords, Staves, Money and Cups, has now grown to hundreds of specimens culled from many different countries. Comparing these with each other, and studying all obtainable histories on the subject, leads to the conclusion that the writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were correct when they stated that no historical record existed before the middle of the fourteenth century of games played with cards. But each and all of the writers on Playing Cards agree that there were cards and that they seem to have been used for fortune-telling before 1350, and also that there was a baffling resemblance between the traditions of the cards and what was recorded of the Egyptian mysteries connected with the worship of Thoth Hermes.