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It's been about four years since I started collecting playing cards, and now that I've amassed a decent number of decks from various sources I thought I'd open a thread to highlight the ones that may not be as well known to other UC members. Some of these may be contemporary non-poker decks, like tarot or hanafuda; others will be vintage poker decks from various resellers. When possible I'll try to link to where I acquired each deck being displayed.

I come by collecting honestly. My grandmother liked to collect tins - shelves and shelves of them, in every imaginable size and motif - and when she finally sold my dad's childhood home I picked just a couple for myself: two hinged Whitman's sampler tins with an illustration by Alphonse Mucha, a favorite of mine. As luck would have it, one turned out to be just right for storing decks of playing cards:


A recreation of my setup at the time. Some decks pictured were obtained later.

This worked well... until it didn't. The tin held "only" 28 standard-sized decks, and around two years ago my collection outgrew it. I started looking for an upgrade. I knew I wanted something about twice as large - surely I would never need space for more than five dozen decks! - and after much frustrated googling I eventually turned up this Etsy listing, from an outfit called Independent Box Works, for bespoke orders of a two-tiered wooden card chest. It was a little more than I'd been hoping to spend, but I was very impressed with their level of service, and I think the final product speaks for itself:


Cat sold separately. (He likes to sit on it when it's closed.)


Under the hood. I asked for a high-gloss finish and the way the tucks reflect on the underside of the lid is amazing in person.


I didn't think to request them at the time, but if I were ordering today I'd ask for 90° stop hinges for the lid. It's propped against the doorjamb here.


Cutout handles in the sides of the top tray for ease of removal. I tuck desiccant packets in there to keep everything nice and dry.


The bottom compartment is undivided and felt-lined - another special request.

For good or for ill my collection is now too large for everything to fit in here - the overflow goes in stacking plastic drawers from the Container Store, a suggestion from another UC member - but I use it to store my favorites. The best (standard-sized) decks go in the top tray, with the best of the best in the middle row between the cutout handles. (The front row is sadly about a millimeter too narrow to store decks widthwise; I use it to hold the vintage Nintendo decks I bought in Japan, another prized deck that I'll highlight in the future, and bric-a-brac from various Kickstarter campaigns.)

Thanks for reading. Decks next time, I promise.

Great pics Birb!

Post more though! And soon!

Thanks for the likes, all! I honestly hadn't expected the first post would receive much feedback since it focused solely on storage. Don't worry, this time I'll be offering plenty of card porn

These two decks are both reproductions of 19th-century patterns. (Of the designs currently in my collection, only the Topkapi Mamluk deck is older.) The first is a transformation deck with original artwork by Louis Atthalin, reproduced by Cartamundi for the National Playing Card Museum in Turnhout, Belgium.



Atthalin seems to have been a man who distinguished himself in many ways: an engineering student of the École Polytechnique, in his lifetime he was elevated to the rank of general in the French army, awarded the Legion of Honor and the Order of Leopold, entitled as a baron, and named to the Chamber of Peers. The accompanying info card for the deck dates the illustrations to 1814-1815; at that time, Napoleon had just made him a colonel, and he was attached to the Duke of Orleans (soon to be Louis-Philippe I, King of the French) as an aide-de-camp. It seems likely to me that many of the scenes on the number cards are drawn directly from his military experience - the scuffling soldiers, the crowded encampments - but there are also gluttonous aristocrats, gesticulating clerics, circus dogs in human pantomime, and performers of every stripe, all rendered in elaborate detail.


Atthalin employs perspective in clever ways throughout; note the swooped back of the baby carriage and the foreshortened cap of the officer on the left.

The court cards are one-way depictions of literary or historical figures, each at a significant juncture in their stories (though the artist apparently managed to sneak in a self-portrait by using himself as the model for Jacquemin Gringonneur on the Jack of Spades). It's the fine details in these tableaux - and Atthalin's obviously keen sense, almost a cinematographer's eye, for capturing the most iconic, evocative "frame" of that scene - that keeps them from paling in comparison to the often frenetic whimsy of the number cards.


The breakout stars of these court cards: the mean-mugging sheep, and the asshole who brought a baby to a knife fight.

The Bibliothèque National de France has scans of each card in Atthalin's deck available on its website. I won my copy on auction from the incomparable jopo! (eBay) for a dirt-cheap minimum bid; a second info card in the deck states it was printed in 1996 to raise funds for the repair of some apparatus also in the museum's possession, so I suspect they are not too difficult to come by.

This second deck, however, nearly got away from me. I decided I was willing to pay the slightly steep price tag - just under one Lotrek - only after the original listing had expired; I ended up messaging the seller, stnmch (eBay), to ask them to relist it.



You can actually see it in my previous post, in the bottom compartment of the card chest; the plain red cloth tuck there at the top-right unfolds to reveal a telescoping box with a picture of a queen. The linework is competent enough, certainly, but the colors are simple and blockish even for lithography, and there's quite a lot of empty space around her that feels underutilized. It really doesn't look like anything special, I can't imagine why I wanted--


Oh. Well then.

I confess, I've literally stacked the deck for this reveal: the title of the (rather thick) accompanying booklet of commentary inside that red outer tuck announces plainly that these are Erotic Playing Cards of the Biedermeier Period, and the image on the inner body of the box makes clear exactly what kind of deck is reproduced here. But to those contemporaries who saw the original cards - and were in the dark as to what they were hiding - there must have been little to distinguish them, at first glance, from any ordinary pack. The cards, both originally and in reproduction, are faintly translucent; it is only when holding them in front of a strong light source, at just the right angle, that the hidden images can be seen.


They're, uh, wrestling.

The number cards conceal lavish, full-color depictions of assorted sex acts in a wide variety of settings; the surface pips are not incorporated into these images in any transformational way and appear to be irrelevant to them.


The Biedermeier courts in SFW-o-Vision™.

The surface figures on the courts, however, are a part of the images they conceal: holding them up to the light lets you, quite literally, undress them with your eyes, and typically reveals a partner as well.


If you can't figure out what she's doing down there, ask your parents.

The reproduction deck was issued in 1979 for the Dutch antique seller Pieter Mefferdt from a complete(!) set of 52 in private hands; the original is dated to sometime between 1830 and 1850 and was likely printed in Frankfurt, though the artist and printer (for reasons that may, hypothetically, involve bestiality and sexy nuns) chose to leave their names off it and are thus unknown. Several examples of translucent cards similar to these can be found by searching the World of Playing Cards, though none appear to be from the same deck that's reproduced here. If you're hoping to find a set of these for yourself, best of luck to you; this is the only one I've seen for sale.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to post questions or comments about these decks, along with suggestions for what kinds of decks in my collection you might be interested in seeing. Until next time!

Not even because they are "erotic", that second deck is really, really cool! Those hidden images are very unique. Are those images inside 2 layers of paper or can you see the image in the back and it shows through with the light? Mu guess is they are hidden inside.

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STLBluesNut wrote:Are those images inside 2 layers of paper or can you see the image in the back and it shows through with the light? Mu guess is they are hidden inside.

Thanks for the feedback, Blues! I should have said so explicitly, but yes, the hidden images that appear when you hold the cards up to the light are not visible under normal lighting conditions from either side, front or back. The backs are - or at least, their outer surface layer is - blank. The accompanying booklet provides some commentary on the printing technique:

In the case of the face cards twelve complements, corresponding to the front view, were to be made visible in front of a light. For this there were two printing plates which fitted exactly on top of one another, the first with the twelve figures for the front view, the second with the engraved representations which were to complement the front view. Each of these two sheets was coloured polychromatically by stencil and finally stuck together one on top of the other, whereby the front sheet was made of thinner paper than the other on which was the veiled picture. A thicker middle sheet between the thinner front sheet and back sheet can by no means be excluded. This is evidenced by the fact that strong lines and coloured parts shine through the front face when viewing normally but not the back face, not only in the case of our reproduced original but also in the case of an early pack of cards which the author uses for comparison. After gluing and drying, the sheet was glossed over and then it could be cut into twelve face cards[....]The production of the forty [numbered] playing cards did not present the card manufacturers with as many difficulties as the picture cards. The face with the colour symbols, clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds, 1 to 10, were produced as the normal French playing cards by stencil. After printing and colouring with several colour stencils nothing more stood in the way of further manufacture of 2x2 colour symbol picture sheets.

The booklet is in German and English, with the German being the original text, and in places the English phrasing is less than clear; but if I am understanding him correctly, the author is saying that in the case of the original deck, the images are clearly visible only from one side (that is, with the face of the card toward the viewer and the light at the back). If so this is different from the reproduction, where a strong light can be used to view the full image, both surface and hidden, from either side:


The King of Clubs viewed from the back and illuminated on the front surface. Since the crispness and color saturation of the surface and hidden image are leveled, the complete image is actually somewhat easier to view this way than from the front.

My suspicion is that the original did indeed use three paper layers and that this reproduction was made with only two. In either case the registration must have been a nightmare, and I imagine even a modern designer would struggle with the process. But I invite Lotrek to prove me wrong, of course.

okay, so truth be told, I've probably revisited this particular thread more in the past few days than any other one for obvious reasons... by God do you got some great cards there 'bird!

First off, while I really appreciate the eclectic uniqueness of the tin box (especially since Mucha is also a fav of mine lol), that wooden box with the high glossy shine of the finish is super elegant. I really need to up my storage game - or, more precisely, get any kinda proper storage and/or figure out a practical display solution for those decks I most cherish lol. As of right now, my decks are just scattered haphazardly everywhere and seem to be stacked precariously on flat surfaces in nearly every room of my apartment. I try to keep most on the shelves of my bookcases (something about the foil of my most blinged out tucks and the worn leather binding of my oldest books just seems like a match made in heaven lol) but, because I take 'em out so often to enjoy and play with, I have a tendency of not putting 'em back and there's like no organization whatsoever... I keep telling myself that I just haven't found the right storage solution yet and I'll know it when I see it, buuuuttt... with the more decks I get, it seems more and more that I'm just using that as an excuse to keep putting off the task of going through and organizing everything. But that wooden box has def given me some inspiration

Secondly, I'm so jelly over just the 2 decks you've shown us so far; most particularly that Erotic Deck with the hidden images - so awesome and def a deck I now gotta spend the rest of my life hunting for... there goes any and all free time and spare cash... gee thanks! lol

But seriously, thanks Merlebird so much for sharing! Can't wait to see what other exceptionally peculiar decks you've got in your eclectic collection... I've got a feeling we've got similar tastes in decks

Glad to hear you've enjoyed the thread thus far, Amy I do still have a fair few decks I've set aside to post about, but it took me a while to write the previous post and I wanted to take a breather while I gave some thought to which decks would go well together for the next one. If anybody has any requests for the kinds of decks they'd like to see (e.g. vintage, contemporary, hanafuda, tarot, etc.) I'm more than happy to bump those up in the queue, so to speak, but in the meantime I've settled on two decks for the next post. Photography is done - unless I decide I don't like the way the lighting came out and retake all of them [MURRAY] - and I'm hopeful I can get it written and uploaded sometime in the next couple weeks.

Re: storage: one idea I kicked around when I was considering my options was picking up a set of wooden drawers of the kind that used to be used for card catalogs. Standard index cards are larger than a poker-sized playing card, so in theory you could felt the insides of the drawers and still fit tucked decks comfortably inside them. I ultimately decided I didn't want to wait for just the right one to come up for sale on eBay or Etsy, but if you're not in a hurry to get something it might be worth looking around to see if any local libraries or offices are getting rid of their old ones as part of a switch to digital records. If nothing else I think they would pair perfectly with a shelf full of beautiful old books

Decks for trade (mostly) not pictured.

Spent today reorganizing the collection and taking inventory so I can start working on getting my P52 back up to date. I do still have the photos taken for the post I promised to finish writing "a couple of weeks" from [checks notes] sixteen months ago; we'll see if I can't do a better job of actually doing the thing this time around. But, one thing at a time.

Questions and comments warmly welcomed, as always. Many of the decks shown were not on P52 and/or hadn't been discussed on UC last I checked and I'm always happy to introduce folks to decks they haven't seen before. Thanks for reading!