Transformation Playing Card Decks
Kishor Gordhandas
21 December 2009, 15:41Card Playing is one of the most popular of indoor amusements, but the cards themselves are often taken for granted. Players rarely look at them because they know all their packs are nearly alike in appearance. The Four suits are identified by their suit signs (PIPS) of different shapes. The French invented the Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades suit signs in order to make the numeral cards easy to distinguish. Each suit has three face cards- (King, Queen and Jack) and Ten Pip cards, numbered from Ten to Ace.
The Germans in particular made a virtue of necessity, and added other decorations to their numeral cards – vignettes of erotic touch. The idea of placing extra designs in the spaces on the suit signs has continued to be a minor theme in playing card designs. The Viennese Botanical pack of 1806 has flower-drawings in between the pips. The modern East German “Cherie” has drawings of scantily-clad girls, while a recent Russian pack has fairy tale decorations.
Another idea was simply to stencil the suit signs over a picture, without caring if they obscured some parts of the design. There is an elaborate 17th century German Hunting pack which uses this technique. In England, the idea was used in Hodge’s beautiful astronomical and geographical pack of 1827, though the designs were also issued without the overprints. Dondorf’s famous “Four Corners Of The World”, uses a similar idea, but encloses the pips in circular space set into the designs on the numeral cards.
There are of course other packs not often used for play; souvenir packs, advertising packs, artistic face cards, cartoon and caricature decks, sporting themes and a variety of novelty packs. Of all the non-standard types of playing cards, the most interesting are the Transformation Playing Cards in which the pip cards have been changed, transformed by the addition of drawings that include each of the pips as part of a picture.
A cardinal rule is that the pips should appear in their standard positions.
Designing the cards calls for wit, time, patience and plenty of ingenuity. The results can be artistic or humorous, but every card has an interest of its own.
Who it was who first doodled on a playing card and finished up with a picture, we do not know. Henry Angelo, the Gregorian fencing master says in his reminiscences that his friend John Nixon, an artist “had the reputation of introducing through his inventive faculty, the most amusing species of caricature, thus converting spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds into grotesque figures and groups”. In 1803, Angelo published nine of his friend’s designs. These cards thus are Britain’s earliest printed transformation cards.
The idea of transforming cards may have developed from a pastime of the late 18th century, and there are some other examples of transformation designs and cards from about 1800, but the fashion for transformation packs was started when the publisher J. C. Cotta of Tubinga, Wurttemberg issued a pack in the form of an almanac in 1804 and followed this up with five more Karten-almanacs, in subsequent years. In each almanac the face cards form a unified group but are unrelated to the transformation pip cards. Although five of the packs were published in card format and the almanac was a small booklet, it would have been very difficult to use the cards for play because the pips were often well integrated into the overall scene. It has been suggested that the fifty-two cards were intended to be displayed at the rate of one each week. The almanac had little value as adjuncts to a calendar for they lacked the dates and their content was of no importance.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the most colourful and novel transformation packs were being issued in America. On the Vanity Fair and Harlequin packs we have pips dining, seating, playing tennis and riding bicycles, while at least two packs were issued as cigarette cards. In the twentieth century, numerous packs have been published but very few original ones. Intercol of London issued in 1986 a mildly erotic pack of transformation cards called “Emanuelle”, designed by a young French artist, Patrick Cuenot. Patrick Cuenot has taken care to make his design piquant rather than tastelessly explicit.
The distinctive feature the transformation packs is that designs are added to the numeral cards to form a picture in which the normal suit signs form an essential part without being moved out of their usual places on the cards. It is the part of the attraction of a transformation pack that the viewer needs to examine the designs very closely in order to appreciate their closeness.
Of late there have been several transformation decks created, each hand drawn and printed in limited edition. Examples of which are as follows.
1) 52 Transformation Playing Cards and 4 Jokers, by S. Heilmeier, Germany. Total No. 110 Packs were made. Mine is number 21 of 110. This excellent pack of cards made during the late 1980’s is special to me as the artist, who is also a collector has had many exchanges of Cards/Books with me. In the above-mentioned pack, he has given me credit by using my name on a transformed PIP on one the cards, the Seven of Diamonds, which shows seven postage stamps. At the bottom left, on a red coloured pip of this Seven of Diamonds, will be seen the last letters of my name, Gordhandas, and underneath the word ending with Nivas, which was the name of my residence, Chandan Nivas, where I was living untill early 1990s.
2) Coney Island: Transformation Cards by Elaine Lewis of UK.
3) A most beautiful transformation playing cards on the theme of Nursery Rhymes by Karl Gerich, made in UK, in the Year 1993.
72 packs were made. Mine is the PROOF Pack, signed by the artist.
4) Circus Transformation Playing Cards, fully gilt edged. My deck is numbered 0500 out of a total of 1000, printed by Mrs. Daphne Schick, in USA and the art work was done by her husband, Frank Schick, who died in 1988.
I have many other interesting transformation decks, mostly facsimiles of the earlier transformation playing cards, in my collection and several are as follows:
a) Kartenalmanach for 1805 published by J. C. Cotta of Tubinga, Wurttemberg in the year 1804.
b) Kartenalmanach for the year 1807. Facsimile by Georg Olmsin 1970.
c) Kartenalmanach 1811, Leipzig edition, Reprinted in the year 1979.
There is a nice catalogue, “Die Cotta’schen Spielkarten—Almanache 1805 – 1811”- showing all the Five packs of Cotta: Year 1805, 1806, 1807, 1809 and 1811, illustrated with each of the 52 cards of the decks, with descriptions of each.
d) Cartes Transformation: of Louis Atthalin: 1814-1815 edition, Turnhout, Belgium: 1996.
e) In 1895 USPC Co., USA produced a pack under the title “Vanity Fair”. This has numerals more in the transformation tradition, without captions. A reprint was made by Fournier of Spain in late 1990’s.
Aside from these reprints there have also been a series of modern revivals:
1) In 1977, Aurelia Books of Brussels issued a twin pack called “Comedia dell’ Carte” in which the courts lampooned Belgian political figures as caricatures of historical persons. An attempt has been made at proper transformations by adding designs to the pips, however, there is little attempt to convert the pips to form parts of the designs, especially in the Clubs suit.
2). In 1977, Laura Sutherland in the USA produced a pack with the pips shifted and distorted, and in various sizes. Many are merely fancy patterns.
3). Four British cartoonists had a try, taking one suit each. There was no attempt to transform any of the pips, but the pack issued as “The Cartoonists’ Pack” met with considerable success.
4). In 1981, Pino Zac designed a French-suited Tarot Pack with the title “Tarot de l’An 2000”. The amusing Trumps and courts have distracted
attraction from the numeral cards where the artist made an attempt at proper transformations. The four suits are constrained to themes: Cars on the Hearts, Police on Spades, Money and Weights on Diamonds, Aerials on Clubs.
5). In 1983, Pino Zac turned to an erotic theme in his “Eroticartes” pack. The courts are clever double-figured designs in which the kings and jacks are seen tangling with girls.
All the above are the fore-runners of Emanuelle Pack mentioned earlier. It combines all the best features of its ancestors, and yet manages to be substantially different: a worthy heir to a distinguished line. Some Italian made facsimiles of earlier packs by Vito Arienti, Italy are as follows.
i) Carte COMICHE, an Italian transformation pack- year 1982.
ii) A 40 card transformation pack: Reprint of the original from 1887 in Nuremberg, printed in 1984.
iii) Cartes Recreatives: Reprint of the original French deck from 1819 in 1984.
Last but not least, a very nice book on transformation playing cards was published by U. S. Games Systems, Inc, USA in 1987, written by an American playing card collector, Albert Field, describing each of the known transformation decks complete with pictures of the full packs wherever available.
As you will go through the article along with the pictures, the meaning of the ‘transformation” cards will become clear and their rare beauty and enchantment will explain why the subject has fascinated the artists and playing cards collectors through several centuries.
Comment
To Reduce Stress Factor, Jaya And I Visited Manali to Buy Peace In Search Of Peace
I recently found a 1895 deck in perfect condition. Do you know what the deck would be worth?
— mary · Apr 21, 13:16 · #