Pick A Card

As civilization progressed forward people lived longer and they weren't constantly forced to work from sun up to sun set. One of the hallmarks of a developing culture is leisure time.  Like any other commodity, leisure time isn't always distributed equally. In a group of hunter-gathers there isn't much need of a hierarchy and the whole tribe works together as if it was a single organism.

As societies got more complex and some of its members could branch off into more specialized labor, control and organization became more important. The work of slaves and peasants was managed by rulers and controllers. Part of the compensation of good management was leisure time.

Leisure time, or at least the opportunity to be away from the hard work of daily subsistence, meant that you could learn a trade, get educated and build a social network. It's not only the games we play but who we play with that creates the web of contacts can be handy when jockeying for a place in the social order.

 

Dolls, balls and other toys date back to the dawn of recorded history. One of the earliest games probably came out of shamanistic rituals to forecast the future. The knuckle and angle bones of many grazing animals are rectangular or even cube shaped.

I was saw an anthropology film about an arctic village that still practiced a hunter/gather lifestyle. The film documented how the hunting had dramatically dropped off when the caribou herds changed their migration paths. The village Shaman had his bag of scared bones that he tossed out on the floor like dice. He used one random event to try and get insight into another random event so he could find the new migration path of the caribou herd.

The first dice were made of animal bones, even today "bones" is still a slang term for dice though probably none of us have ever thrown a pair. In the ancient world dice were ubiquitous. Even in the Bible dice are mentioned when the Roman Soldiers gamble over the robe of Jesus.

Sometime in the 9th century the Chinese create playing cards. At that time China was the most advanced civilization in the world and there is a large enough ruling and middle class that has leisure time. Playing cards got carried along the Silk Route into India and the Middle East.

  

  

Gamblers found new games of chance to wager on, fortune tellers use the random patterns from a shuffled deck to prognosticate with and  magicians used mathematics to perform card tricks. Italian traders brought playing cards back home with them from the spice markets in Egypt. The earliest authenticated reference to cards is 1377. What we know as a the popular poker deck or French Deck of cards is only slightly removed from the Tarot Deck. No one truly knows the origin of the word tarot though many believe it's has an Arabic root.

 

Playing cards swept through Europe quickly.  The first decks were handmade but playing cards came just as Europeans were learning how to commercially make paper and Guttenberg was perfecting the printing press. As the Renaissance spread across the continent the economy grew and leisure time began to be democratized.

A deck of playing cards was like a Gameboy or Playstation today. There are hundreds if not thousands of different games that could be devised out of a deck of fifty-two cards. There are also specialty decks for games like Pinochle. I'm told that one of the most common games on computer, smart phone or game consult is still solitaire. One of the spin-offs of the popularity of playing cards is gambling and the mathematical study of probability. The connection between gambling and probability is so strong that many Muslim schools and centers of higher education do not teach it.

When I was very young there was one story from Ripley's Believe It Or Not about a man who committed suicide with a deck of cards.

William Kogut was in prison. It was not uncommon for prisoner to pass the time with a deck of cards. In the 1930's the red ink in playing cards was made with nitrocellulose. Nitrocellulose had many uses, it replaced ivory in billiard balls and glass plates in photography as nitrocellulose film -but nitrocellulose is flammable and under the right condition even explosive.

From as many twenty decks of cards William Kogut over time constructed an improvised pipe bomb.

There is an International Playing Card Society and December 28th is National Playing Card Day.

At least 100 million decks of playing cards are sold every year.

One manufacturer of playing cards established their own radio station WSAI in Cincinnati in 1922. One of the featured shows was "Bridge By Radio".  WSAI is still on the air but no longer owned and operated by the United States Playing Card Company.

It's a rainy day and a good card game right now would the just the thing.

In New Jersey I knew a collector of books,some of us called him Half Price Ron. In his circle of friends there was one collector of playing cards. Since the American Civil War playing cards became the vehicle of advertising, propaganda, military information and pornography. Playing cards remain a very accessible item to collect.