Bearing in mind that I'm probably completely wrong about some of this:
I think playing cards originated in China and were transmitted through the Middle East to Europe.
-Some of the earliest Italian references to the game refer to it as being a Saracen game and use some variation of the word na'ib to reference the game.
-But there are no instances of cards in India, that I am aware of, during the period when cards would have passed through from China to the Middle East. Cards could have skipped India but I consider this less likely.
-I have looked for references to playing cards in Islamic literature of the time and haven't found any. I would expect a game that is mostly chance to be very firmly denounced by religious scholars of the time and I don't see anything. Since I've barely scratched the surface of the material relating to the medieval Islamic world it could simply be that I haven't yet found one of many, potential, references.
-The earliest cards to survive in the Middle East are the Topkapi deck(s) from the 15th-16th Century. This is well after playing cards are documented in Europe.
-The De Unger card fragment predates all cards by a considerable time frame IF it's actually a playing card fragment (I believe it is) AND the dating is correct (I'm skeptical but I'm not a world class authority on Islamic art).
Playing Cards entered Europe through Spain and Italy at about the same time.
-Sometime just before or in the last quarter of the 14th Century.
-If I had to guess I'd say they entered Italy first.
-Diffusion was incredibly rapid in some areas. In Paris they're outlawing card-play on work days by 1380. Yet cards seem to have avoided England for another couple of decades.
The earliest playing cards were hand drawn/painted.
-The earliest references to playing card manufacturers are people who were also artists.
-Many of the earliest decks (Cloisters, Topkapi) are hand drawn/painted.
-But the fact that cards were available to enough of the working class in 1380 Paris to draw legislation that forbid playing on work days suggests that cards were cheap and plentiful and, thus, not confined to expensive and rare works of art.
Playing cards were probably one of the earliest mass-manufactured items using block printing.
-Which is curious because block printing had been around for a while. It was used in Europe for printing fabric and images of Saints and in the Islamic world for fabric and 'magic' amulets. But printing on paper doesn't become a big thing until the 15th Century.
-Cards tended to be printed using woodblocks. Once printed they were colored, to some degree or another, using stencils, hand-painting, and in the case of at least one deck by finger-painting. I am not aware of any decks of cards that were not colored in some way.
-Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple seem to have been the primary colors used in stenciled decks. Painted decks used the full-spectrum of colors. The Topkapi deck(s) may have used a couple varieties of gold leaf (adulterated with silver).
-Stencils were not particularly detailed and the paint went over the printed (black) lines and was sometimes off-center.
-It was difficult for printers to produce a uniform card back. This did not prevent them from trying. So while plain backs and mono-color backs were the most popular options early on there are illustrations from quite early showing cards with decorated backs. Diapered patterns (look it up) seem to have been very popular and card makers may have counted on each card being different enough, and similar enough, that individual cards could not be made out from their back alone. This was a technique used in the 18th Century where card makers printed cards with complicated, but individual patterns.
-Cards started off with a single orientation that showed the whole figure of court cards rather than the double-ended, half-figure cards we are used to today.
-Cards lacked corner indices to indicate the value/order of the card and the suit of the card. These were added (number/value first) beginning in the 17th Century.
-Cards were printed on large sheets which were then cut with large scissors to make a finished deck with square corners. In general. There are also examples of cards with non-rectangular shapes. The Cloisters cards are oval. Der Meister der Spielkarten made a 15th Century deck that was round. Some early decks clearly have rounded corners.
-Many (most) of the surviving examples of cards we currently have are printer's cast-offs. Sheets that were not used for one reason or another and were re-cycled to be put to other uses in the print shop.
The paper used to produce playing cards was of a good quality.
-Primarily hemp with linen, hair, and other fiber add ins.
-It seems to have been a pretty durable paper.
-Cards seem to have been printed on paper in which the glue (a starch glue made from wheat flour and water) played a significant role. Multiple sheets seem to have been glued together to form a pasteboard. Later illustrations (wood cuts) will show printed sheets of paper hanging over wood rods to air dry. Putting these together and getting the requisite stiffness suggests the glue was important and that paper was made thick after printing rather than before. We know from later accounts that paper was definitely glued together before printing so perhaps the printed veneer sheet was glued to a paste-board sheet? The truth is that variety ruled. Playing cards made on cardstock (a thick single layer of paper) have been found as have cards made from putting together layers of paper.
-The references to playing cards being fined with chalk and starch appear to refer to the single example of the Cloisters playing cards which were prepared in the fashion of a typical painting by having at least one layer of gesso (starch and chalk) applied. This made the playing cards quite thick and produces an effect not seen in other decks of cards so it's likely this was atypical. The Stuttgart deck was also fined with gesso.
Regional card styles were in place before the middle of the 15th Century. Major design schools include:
-Islamic.
-Latin (Italian and Spanish).
-German (Swiss, German).
-French.
-There were blended forms in the geographic areas between the major regional areas. E.G. there are decks showing combinations of Italian and German elements in the area between Switzerland and Northern Italy.
-As cities became established production centers for playing cards they produced decks for export. So you can find Spanish-style decks being produced in Germany. Or Italian decks being produced in France.
The Islamic Style includes:
-A court composed of a king, a deputy, and an under deputy. The courts are represented by a simple throne and do not have any animals or people depicted.
-The suits are coins, cups, swords (primarily curved with straight swords for the odd numbered cards, less the ace), and polo-sticks.
-Floral decoration plays an enormous role.
-The Topkapi deck is the primary example of this style and is actually a deck comprised of a major contributor deck that has been supplemented with cards from at least one, and possibly two, other decks. The cards are enormous (8 inches high) and each one appears to have been hand made. They were also modified by the addition of the blue fields with Arabic script.
The Latin Style includes:
-A court composed of a king, knight, and page. The courts are represented by human figures. The king is typically seated, the knight is typically mounted.
-The suits are coins, cups (the Spanish style cup is more square/blocky), clubs/batons (the Spanish style club is a crude cudgel that might still have some leaves on it while the Italian style baton is a crafted symbol of position rather than a crude club), and swords (Italian swords are curved except for the ace and, usually, the odd sword on odd numbered cards, Spanish swords are straight, except for, usually, the ace).
-The arrangements of the suit cards are fairly standard within the two styles and the Spanish arrangement is different from the Italian.
-The later you go the more pip cards the Spanish deck does away with. While it starts out with 10's it quickly discards those. In some later decks the 9's are also discarded.
The German Style includes:
-A court composed of a king, over, and under. The courts are represented by human figures. The king is typically seated, the over and under stand. The over is designated by the suit sign being at head level or higher. The under is designated by the suit sign being a foot level. There are examples of mounted overs by they are not frequent. There are also examples of decks with a king, mounted knight, over, and under. There are also decks with queens. In fact, you can find just about any court composition in German decks if you look long enough.
-The suits are typically hearts, leaves, bells, and acorns for German decks. Swiss decks typically use shields, leaves, bells, and acorns. HOWEVER, the Germans put just about anything on a deck. Hunting themes were popular but you can find birds, dogs, crowns, the heads of priests, and lots of other items being used for suits. I have counted more than thirty different suits in use in the various examples of German/Swiss decks.
-German style decks typically use a ten with a Roman numeral ten on them (X). Swiss decks typically use a banner displaying the suit symbol for the ten. You can find instances of both in both (i.e. German decks with banner tens and Swiss decks with X tens).
-Neither deck typically uses an ace (1) card.
The French Style includes:
-A court composed of a king, queen, and jack. The courts are represented by human figures, The king may be seated (in earlier decks) or standing (particularly in later decks) and is typically distinguished by a crown and a robe that reaches the floor. The queen may be seated or standing. The jack is typically standing and has short robes.
-The suits are hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades though the shapes are called differently in French.
-The French suits were adopted by the English and became the standard international deck we know today.
-Some French decks appear to have had a court composed of two kings and two queens and one jack.
-At least one French deck was made with five suits with the fifth suit being a red crescent.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Self- Publishing Playing Cards
This is really about self-publishing playing cards, but it's easily applied to other works of art and I encourage hobby artists to consider self-publishing their work.
First things first. You aren't going to make a lot of money. You aren't. Unless you're an extremely hard worker, incredibly persistent, and unbelievably lucky. So don't approach this with the expectation that you're going to quit your day job and happily make art all day long because you aren't.
Playing cards are a mass-manufactured item with lots of societal expectations. Modern customers expect the cards to be certain sizes, certain shapes, and to contain certain familiar elements. They want the international standard suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades), they want a King, Queen, and Jack in the court. They want an ace in every suit. They want a joker or two. They want decorated card backs. And so on. There are thousands of different card designs out there and all the truly successful ones cater to these desires. Any deck of cards you produce that doesn't conform to these expectations is losing market share. The more different your deck is, the fewer people who will be interested in purchasing it. Unless it captures the market's attention. This is true even in the medieval recreation market where people should be more concerned with authentic design, appearance, and construction. You have been warned.
Playing cards using standard elements, the ones that cater to the desires of the modern market, are produced in job lots of hundreds of thousands. This reduces the per unit cost of a deck of cards down to fractions of a dollar. A standard deck of bridge size playing cards can cost as little as five cents a deck when ordered in lots of a thousand or more. Which is fortunate because production costs are actually one of the smallest expenses. Once a deck is produced it has to be shipped, stored, marketed, sold, and shipped. On top of that there are the associated costs of running a business.
While it's tempting to say, I'm not running a business, I'm just doing this as a hobby, you can't really do that. To some degree or another you will be running a business. It is possible to minimize your overhead but that comes with associated costs.
I'm going to be very brief here and, despite what you've read above, my intention is to encourage hobby artists, particularly people in the SCA, to look at making some of their work commercially available. Why? Not because you're going to make money, but because it makes your art available to a wider audience. It can be very satisfying to walk by an encampment and see people using your artwork to have fun and enhance the atmosphere of the event. Which is why I focus on doing things for the lowest possible cost.
I'm going to address three basic ways of making cards:
1) By hand using traditional techniques and tools.
2) By hand using modern techniques and tools.
3) Using a commercial print-on-demand service.
Method 1 is practiced by more people than you would think. There's a certain satisfaction that can only be found in hand-carving print blocks, printing on authentic paper, adding color with stencils, and hand cutting the cards. There are tutorials on this process that can be found on the World of Playing Cards website and on YouTube. You should look them up even if you have no intention of ever making cards by hand. A deck of cards produced in this fashion should be priced at $50-$100 per deck. You can also produce hand-painted decks of cards that will be a more accurate representation of the earliest decks and some of the more opulent decks. Decks produced in this fashion should be priced at about $300-$1,000 per deck.
Method 2 uses period techniques (wood-block printing, stenciling) but 'cheats' by using modern tools. You might use a CNC laser or router to produce the wood-block. Or you might use a lino block rather than a low grain seasoned wood. You can laser cut the stencils. Or use modern inks instead of mixing period paints. There are too many possible combinations of choices you can make based on the availability of tools and materials to discuss this at any length. You should be able to reduce the price of a deck produced in this fashion by about 30%.
Method 3 is the method I will discuss at greatest length. This involves creating card designs, uploading them to a commercial print-on-demand service or sending them to a professional printer and producing the cards on demand or in small batches. I will note that if you are producing your cards in small batches it is worth your while to make the small batches a little larger and to introduce a method of keeping track of which cards were produced in which batches. This will help your cards become collectible.
I have used Printer's Studio, Arts Cow, and Make Playing Cards to produce decks of cards. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages but they are all fairly alike in being print on demand companies located in China with no minimum order. You can also print with companies like Bicycle, Cartamundi, and the like, but they will have minimum orders of 500-2000 decks at a time and considerably longer setup times. They also produce better quality cards. But they don't produce medieval cards. What do I mean by that? Let's look at the compromises inherent in using this system.
-Modern playing card stock is very slick and/or has a 'linen' texture applied to it to prevent the cards from sticking together. This is really the biggest issue.
-Modern printers are very reluctant to print right up to the edge of the cards as was the custom up until the 19th Century. You can do it, but the results are inconsistent. Also, be aware that customers are intolerant of manufacturing defects of any sort EVEN IF THEY ARE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE.
-Some manufacturers will simply not sell you a deck without rounded corners. Some will but you have to request it every time you order cards. That makes it hard for people to order decks without assistance and if you have to assist everyone ordering cards then that's costing you money in labor costs. You want to make this as simple and painless and maintenance free as possible.
-You have to choose from standard deck size offerings. MPC offers a lot of options but even they can't match all the sizes medieval playing cards came in. You may have to alter designs to fit available printing formats.
One advantage to using a professional printer is they can do consistent card backs. This is good, sort of. Consistent card backs aren't a big feature of early playing cards. It's why so many decks had plain backs or, in the case of more expensive decks, mono-color backs. Deck backs relied on busy designs so that on average the backs looked mostly the same and individual cards couldn't be distinguished from other cards. So the advantage of getting uniform backs actually detracts from more closely approaching an authentic appearance. As a side note, you may be tempted to make a 'marked' deck of your cards. I don't recommend this. While it would be cool and probably sell a few decks, it will discourage the purchase of your regular version of the deck.
I'm going to go over the way I create a new deck of cards. The first thing I do is the design work. I look at existing examples. I decide what I want to do. I make notes. I make sketches. I get the deck straight in my head. Then I decide what printer to use. For me, I've standardized on Printer's Studio because that allows me sell my designs through their website.
Once the printer has been decided on I download their templates. It's very important to use the printer's templates because if you don't you are going to get inconsistent (BAD) results. Every printer will have a safety area that your file must extend into. Every printer will have a safety area which they recommend you don't print in because imperfections in the cutting process may destroy some of the content there. Finally, every printer will have a design area that will definitely print on every card. I tend to use two free graphic programs: Inkscape and GIMP. GIMP is the free equivalent of PhotoShop while Inkscape is a vector graphics program most easily compared to PowerPoint. I do most of my work on elements of the cards in GIMP and then I import the elements into Inkscape, convert them from raster objects to vector objects and then assemble the cards using these individual elements in Inkscape.
Vector? Raster? Yeah, you'll need to learn some terminology. I'm not going to cover this in any detail. I suggest you look it up. Both of these programs have a learning curve and take some time to learn. I'm not going to teach you how to use them. I will offer you one word that you should research in both programs as understanding the idea and how to use the feature is crucial: Layers. The only thing I have to teach you is setting up the template. Two things to remember: DPI and sizing. Sizing is the physical dimensions of the image. I always make my templates twice as large as the actual cards will be (actually, twice as large as the templates from the printer call for). I do this because I find the printer will condense the image down to fit the card without a loss of detail. In fact, I get finer detail. DPI stands for dots per inch. Simply put the more dots per inch your image has the more detail it will have. You absolutely must have at least 300DPI. 400DPI is better. 600DPI is probably the best your computer can handle unless you've got a high-end machine with lots and lots of RAM (16GB or more).
Instead of teaching you how to do graphic arts on a computer I'm going to assume you've got more artistic talent than me and you created your prototype deck by hand. You're going to take a high resolution picture of each card. When I do this, I use my camera and I have the card lying flat on a mono-color surface with lights on three sides to eliminate shadows. No need for an expensive camera, your typical cell-phone camera will take a great photo. I find cell-phone pictures are better than using a scanner. Unless you've got a really good scanner it's going to have less detail than a cell-phone picture.
Once you've taken 52 pictures you need to take two more. You need a picture of the plain paper the cards are on. You also need a picture of the back of the cards. If you are using a plain back then you only need to take one more photo.
Now you need to construct your cards. You will do this by cropping and sizing your images to fit into the template. REMEMBER, the template includes area around the outside border that will not be printed and area that should be printed and, in the center, area that absolutely will be printed. I like to use the blank paper image as a background layer. Then each card is cropped and centered on the template in a layer above the background layer. When I save this image (in a format the printer will accept, typically a TIFF format) the two layers will be combined exactly as I see them on the screen. That's one card. Repeat this process 51 more times. Make sure to make a last image for the back of the card.
A typical deck will have 54 cards in it. There are reasons for this that I'm not going in to. That leaves you two cards to have fun with. I recommend a joker of some sort. Completely not a Medieval or Renaissance thing. They typically had a Jack or Unter that was clownish rather than a separate Joker. But modern customers like a joker. So have some fun with this. For the second card I recommend advertising. Take some credit for your work. Put a copyright notice on your work. Seriously. Copyright your work. It's your friggin' work and people shouldn't be stealing it. Put a link to your website, your blog, or whatever. Remember, you can use both sides of this card.
The on-demand printers I have mentioned will walk you through the process of uploading cards. You should expect to mess up more than once. If you manage to upload your first deck of cards without having to re-build the deck at least once I will be amazed. And probably hate you. You have been warned.
Once you've successfully uploaded a design it's time to buy a deck to see if you like it. All this work to get a test deck? Yep, and there's more work to be done before you can sell the design on the internet. That's why your decks will sell in the $10-$20 range. They should sell in the $15-$30 range but no one will buy them at that price.
When you get your test deck you will probably find all sorts of things you want to change. Make a list. Put the list away for a week. Come back to it and decide if you really want to make all the changes. Make the changes you really want. Now get another test deck. If that turns out okay you're ready to go. There are a lot of ways to sell your cards online. Some of those ways include:
Etsy. Yes the cards are manufactured by pros but they're using your design. It's good.
Ebay.
Square Marketplace.
Facebook. There are several services that will help you set up a page to take orders through Facebook. Shopify is just one example.
Or you can just spam places where people who want to buy playing cards hang out. Your kingdom list/discussion group? Facebook groups. Whatever. Then you are responsible for fulfilling orders. What is fulfillment? It is taking an order, billing the customer, making sure the money has been received, packaging the order, shipping the order, and confirming the customer has received the order and is happy. This takes time. Time is money. Time spent fulfilling orders is time I can't use to make more art. If I'm not making enough money (defined as being at least as much as I make at the job I work at to pay my bills) fulfilling orders then I don't want to do it. I want someone else to do it.
Right now my best solution for doing this is Printer's Studio. They will allow me to set up a free website, through them, and sell my designs. I can set the amount of profit I want to make per deck, write my own descriptions, do my own advertising, and Printer's Studio will take the orders, bill the customer, and ship the order. Once a quarter, if I've sold enough decks, I get a check (actually a PayPal transfer) from Printer Studio.
It's worth discussing how much I get. I've got, at last count, 12 different decks for sale. I've been selling cards for about three years now. I have made approximately $300 dollars in that time. I have spent easily 300 hours working on these decks. Which means I've made less than a dollar an hour. From a simple economic standpoint I'd have been better off putting in overtime at work. But making money is not the point. I've met some incredible people who share my interest in playing cards. I've printed my own copies of these cards. I've had fun researching, restoring, rescuing, and creating decks of cards. And I've contributed, in a very, very, very, very, very small way to enhancing the atmosphere at some medieval events around the world. That's my profit.
Now, since you've done all this work let's consider what else you can do with your artwork. You can assemble your cards, put them all together as if they were a single printer's sheet and put them on a poster. You can put individual cards on posters or clothing. You can even print them on glasses (which was apparently popular in the 18th Century). How? By going through a print on demand service like Printer's Studio, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, or even Cafe Press (I don't like Cafe Press for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality, selection, or customer service).
This has been, for me, a very long post and it has really only scratched the surface of what's possible. I encourage you to make your artwork available to a larger audience and try to make a little money of it. If you end up making a lot of money you can use that to make more art or you can give it away and make yourself feel better. If you decide on the latter course, email me.
First things first. You aren't going to make a lot of money. You aren't. Unless you're an extremely hard worker, incredibly persistent, and unbelievably lucky. So don't approach this with the expectation that you're going to quit your day job and happily make art all day long because you aren't.
Playing cards are a mass-manufactured item with lots of societal expectations. Modern customers expect the cards to be certain sizes, certain shapes, and to contain certain familiar elements. They want the international standard suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades), they want a King, Queen, and Jack in the court. They want an ace in every suit. They want a joker or two. They want decorated card backs. And so on. There are thousands of different card designs out there and all the truly successful ones cater to these desires. Any deck of cards you produce that doesn't conform to these expectations is losing market share. The more different your deck is, the fewer people who will be interested in purchasing it. Unless it captures the market's attention. This is true even in the medieval recreation market where people should be more concerned with authentic design, appearance, and construction. You have been warned.
Playing cards using standard elements, the ones that cater to the desires of the modern market, are produced in job lots of hundreds of thousands. This reduces the per unit cost of a deck of cards down to fractions of a dollar. A standard deck of bridge size playing cards can cost as little as five cents a deck when ordered in lots of a thousand or more. Which is fortunate because production costs are actually one of the smallest expenses. Once a deck is produced it has to be shipped, stored, marketed, sold, and shipped. On top of that there are the associated costs of running a business.
While it's tempting to say, I'm not running a business, I'm just doing this as a hobby, you can't really do that. To some degree or another you will be running a business. It is possible to minimize your overhead but that comes with associated costs.
I'm going to be very brief here and, despite what you've read above, my intention is to encourage hobby artists, particularly people in the SCA, to look at making some of their work commercially available. Why? Not because you're going to make money, but because it makes your art available to a wider audience. It can be very satisfying to walk by an encampment and see people using your artwork to have fun and enhance the atmosphere of the event. Which is why I focus on doing things for the lowest possible cost.
I'm going to address three basic ways of making cards:
1) By hand using traditional techniques and tools.
2) By hand using modern techniques and tools.
3) Using a commercial print-on-demand service.
Method 1 is practiced by more people than you would think. There's a certain satisfaction that can only be found in hand-carving print blocks, printing on authentic paper, adding color with stencils, and hand cutting the cards. There are tutorials on this process that can be found on the World of Playing Cards website and on YouTube. You should look them up even if you have no intention of ever making cards by hand. A deck of cards produced in this fashion should be priced at $50-$100 per deck. You can also produce hand-painted decks of cards that will be a more accurate representation of the earliest decks and some of the more opulent decks. Decks produced in this fashion should be priced at about $300-$1,000 per deck.
Method 2 uses period techniques (wood-block printing, stenciling) but 'cheats' by using modern tools. You might use a CNC laser or router to produce the wood-block. Or you might use a lino block rather than a low grain seasoned wood. You can laser cut the stencils. Or use modern inks instead of mixing period paints. There are too many possible combinations of choices you can make based on the availability of tools and materials to discuss this at any length. You should be able to reduce the price of a deck produced in this fashion by about 30%.
Method 3 is the method I will discuss at greatest length. This involves creating card designs, uploading them to a commercial print-on-demand service or sending them to a professional printer and producing the cards on demand or in small batches. I will note that if you are producing your cards in small batches it is worth your while to make the small batches a little larger and to introduce a method of keeping track of which cards were produced in which batches. This will help your cards become collectible.
I have used Printer's Studio, Arts Cow, and Make Playing Cards to produce decks of cards. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages but they are all fairly alike in being print on demand companies located in China with no minimum order. You can also print with companies like Bicycle, Cartamundi, and the like, but they will have minimum orders of 500-2000 decks at a time and considerably longer setup times. They also produce better quality cards. But they don't produce medieval cards. What do I mean by that? Let's look at the compromises inherent in using this system.
-Modern playing card stock is very slick and/or has a 'linen' texture applied to it to prevent the cards from sticking together. This is really the biggest issue.
-Modern printers are very reluctant to print right up to the edge of the cards as was the custom up until the 19th Century. You can do it, but the results are inconsistent. Also, be aware that customers are intolerant of manufacturing defects of any sort EVEN IF THEY ARE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE.
-Some manufacturers will simply not sell you a deck without rounded corners. Some will but you have to request it every time you order cards. That makes it hard for people to order decks without assistance and if you have to assist everyone ordering cards then that's costing you money in labor costs. You want to make this as simple and painless and maintenance free as possible.
-You have to choose from standard deck size offerings. MPC offers a lot of options but even they can't match all the sizes medieval playing cards came in. You may have to alter designs to fit available printing formats.
One advantage to using a professional printer is they can do consistent card backs. This is good, sort of. Consistent card backs aren't a big feature of early playing cards. It's why so many decks had plain backs or, in the case of more expensive decks, mono-color backs. Deck backs relied on busy designs so that on average the backs looked mostly the same and individual cards couldn't be distinguished from other cards. So the advantage of getting uniform backs actually detracts from more closely approaching an authentic appearance. As a side note, you may be tempted to make a 'marked' deck of your cards. I don't recommend this. While it would be cool and probably sell a few decks, it will discourage the purchase of your regular version of the deck.
I'm going to go over the way I create a new deck of cards. The first thing I do is the design work. I look at existing examples. I decide what I want to do. I make notes. I make sketches. I get the deck straight in my head. Then I decide what printer to use. For me, I've standardized on Printer's Studio because that allows me sell my designs through their website.
Once the printer has been decided on I download their templates. It's very important to use the printer's templates because if you don't you are going to get inconsistent (BAD) results. Every printer will have a safety area that your file must extend into. Every printer will have a safety area which they recommend you don't print in because imperfections in the cutting process may destroy some of the content there. Finally, every printer will have a design area that will definitely print on every card. I tend to use two free graphic programs: Inkscape and GIMP. GIMP is the free equivalent of PhotoShop while Inkscape is a vector graphics program most easily compared to PowerPoint. I do most of my work on elements of the cards in GIMP and then I import the elements into Inkscape, convert them from raster objects to vector objects and then assemble the cards using these individual elements in Inkscape.
Vector? Raster? Yeah, you'll need to learn some terminology. I'm not going to cover this in any detail. I suggest you look it up. Both of these programs have a learning curve and take some time to learn. I'm not going to teach you how to use them. I will offer you one word that you should research in both programs as understanding the idea and how to use the feature is crucial: Layers. The only thing I have to teach you is setting up the template. Two things to remember: DPI and sizing. Sizing is the physical dimensions of the image. I always make my templates twice as large as the actual cards will be (actually, twice as large as the templates from the printer call for). I do this because I find the printer will condense the image down to fit the card without a loss of detail. In fact, I get finer detail. DPI stands for dots per inch. Simply put the more dots per inch your image has the more detail it will have. You absolutely must have at least 300DPI. 400DPI is better. 600DPI is probably the best your computer can handle unless you've got a high-end machine with lots and lots of RAM (16GB or more).
Instead of teaching you how to do graphic arts on a computer I'm going to assume you've got more artistic talent than me and you created your prototype deck by hand. You're going to take a high resolution picture of each card. When I do this, I use my camera and I have the card lying flat on a mono-color surface with lights on three sides to eliminate shadows. No need for an expensive camera, your typical cell-phone camera will take a great photo. I find cell-phone pictures are better than using a scanner. Unless you've got a really good scanner it's going to have less detail than a cell-phone picture.
Once you've taken 52 pictures you need to take two more. You need a picture of the plain paper the cards are on. You also need a picture of the back of the cards. If you are using a plain back then you only need to take one more photo.
Now you need to construct your cards. You will do this by cropping and sizing your images to fit into the template. REMEMBER, the template includes area around the outside border that will not be printed and area that should be printed and, in the center, area that absolutely will be printed. I like to use the blank paper image as a background layer. Then each card is cropped and centered on the template in a layer above the background layer. When I save this image (in a format the printer will accept, typically a TIFF format) the two layers will be combined exactly as I see them on the screen. That's one card. Repeat this process 51 more times. Make sure to make a last image for the back of the card.
A typical deck will have 54 cards in it. There are reasons for this that I'm not going in to. That leaves you two cards to have fun with. I recommend a joker of some sort. Completely not a Medieval or Renaissance thing. They typically had a Jack or Unter that was clownish rather than a separate Joker. But modern customers like a joker. So have some fun with this. For the second card I recommend advertising. Take some credit for your work. Put a copyright notice on your work. Seriously. Copyright your work. It's your friggin' work and people shouldn't be stealing it. Put a link to your website, your blog, or whatever. Remember, you can use both sides of this card.
The on-demand printers I have mentioned will walk you through the process of uploading cards. You should expect to mess up more than once. If you manage to upload your first deck of cards without having to re-build the deck at least once I will be amazed. And probably hate you. You have been warned.
Once you've successfully uploaded a design it's time to buy a deck to see if you like it. All this work to get a test deck? Yep, and there's more work to be done before you can sell the design on the internet. That's why your decks will sell in the $10-$20 range. They should sell in the $15-$30 range but no one will buy them at that price.
When you get your test deck you will probably find all sorts of things you want to change. Make a list. Put the list away for a week. Come back to it and decide if you really want to make all the changes. Make the changes you really want. Now get another test deck. If that turns out okay you're ready to go. There are a lot of ways to sell your cards online. Some of those ways include:
Etsy. Yes the cards are manufactured by pros but they're using your design. It's good.
Ebay.
Square Marketplace.
Facebook. There are several services that will help you set up a page to take orders through Facebook. Shopify is just one example.
Or you can just spam places where people who want to buy playing cards hang out. Your kingdom list/discussion group? Facebook groups. Whatever. Then you are responsible for fulfilling orders. What is fulfillment? It is taking an order, billing the customer, making sure the money has been received, packaging the order, shipping the order, and confirming the customer has received the order and is happy. This takes time. Time is money. Time spent fulfilling orders is time I can't use to make more art. If I'm not making enough money (defined as being at least as much as I make at the job I work at to pay my bills) fulfilling orders then I don't want to do it. I want someone else to do it.
Right now my best solution for doing this is Printer's Studio. They will allow me to set up a free website, through them, and sell my designs. I can set the amount of profit I want to make per deck, write my own descriptions, do my own advertising, and Printer's Studio will take the orders, bill the customer, and ship the order. Once a quarter, if I've sold enough decks, I get a check (actually a PayPal transfer) from Printer Studio.
It's worth discussing how much I get. I've got, at last count, 12 different decks for sale. I've been selling cards for about three years now. I have made approximately $300 dollars in that time. I have spent easily 300 hours working on these decks. Which means I've made less than a dollar an hour. From a simple economic standpoint I'd have been better off putting in overtime at work. But making money is not the point. I've met some incredible people who share my interest in playing cards. I've printed my own copies of these cards. I've had fun researching, restoring, rescuing, and creating decks of cards. And I've contributed, in a very, very, very, very, very small way to enhancing the atmosphere at some medieval events around the world. That's my profit.
Now, since you've done all this work let's consider what else you can do with your artwork. You can assemble your cards, put them all together as if they were a single printer's sheet and put them on a poster. You can put individual cards on posters or clothing. You can even print them on glasses (which was apparently popular in the 18th Century). How? By going through a print on demand service like Printer's Studio, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, or even Cafe Press (I don't like Cafe Press for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality, selection, or customer service).
This has been, for me, a very long post and it has really only scratched the surface of what's possible. I encourage you to make your artwork available to a larger audience and try to make a little money of it. If you end up making a lot of money you can use that to make more art or you can give it away and make yourself feel better. If you decide on the latter course, email me.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Stuckely Playing Cards
More playing cards! One of my favorite decks is in the holdings of the British Museum. These are referred to as the Stuckely Decks after the man who exhibited them to The Society of Antiquaries in 1763. The cards themselves were collected by Dr. Thomas Rawlinson at an earlier date. They came to the museum through the collection of Lady Charlotte Schreiber. You should remember that name if you're studying early cards. Look it up.
This particular portion of the collection was put together in the 18th Century and contains three sets of cards. The first is a badly degraded deck dated to the late 15th Century, the second is an 18th Century watercolor recreation of the deck done using alternate colors, and the third is the court cards of an 18th Century French deck.
The first set can be viewed here:
The second and third sets can be seen here:
As you can see, the second set is a later copy (18th Century) of the first set which dates to a much earlier time (15th Century). Because the second set is in much better condition I elected to re-create that deck first. I retained the original colors because it seemed like the thing to do and because I was intrigued by some of the color choices the 18th Century copyist had made. The decision to give the court figures red hair (instead of the usual yellow or black) was particularly intriguing. I mentally dubbed this deck "The Redheads".
I have all the artistic skill of a rock. Well, maybe not a rock, but I'm not a skilled artist. My usual modus operandi when faced with a deck like this is to preserve as much of the original work as possible. So I downloaded the images and set to work. I cleaned up as much as I could and then began the work of digitally restoring the cards. The background had to go. It was simply too dirty. On the other hand people seem to prefer the 'olde tyme' look (and, yes, I'm saying that with a little bit of derision). I opted for a darker version of a natural paper coloration. Don't get me started, again, on paper in the Middle Ages; let's just say I should have gone with a lighter background.
I had to recreate the pip cards. I did this by taking the cleanest examples of elements I could find and cleaning them up a little more. Then I cut and pasted those elements to recreate the pip cards. I added an ace to each suit because it allows modern players to play modern games with the deck. The actual deck, as is typical of German style decks of the time, didn't have an ace. I simplified the two of acorns and leaves. This wasn't simple laziness on my part. I got a fairly nice unicorn prepared and then decided I preferred a cleaner representation AND I wanted to make sure my replica didn't get confused with any reproductions the Museum might care to produce in the future.
The courts were more difficult. They were pretty messy to begin with and the unter of bells was missing altogether. I altered a copy of the ober of hearts to make a new unter of bells. Not my finest work but I think it's pretty good. I cleaned up a lot of the faded coloring. My favorite moment working with this deck occurred during this process. As I altered the contrast of the unter of acorns, the archer, the dingy blue colors revealed themselves to be greens. That was awesome. Sort of. Because then I had to go back and alter the entire suit of leaves (which I had already done) to match the greens of the archer. I'm glad I did because it made the entire deck much nicer, but it was one of those moments where I wished I'd gotten it right sooner.
The results can bee seen in this sample image:
I had to give the cards wider borders. Why? Modern printers demand it and it's fairly easy for me to modify the deck if I want to do my own printing. I elected to give the deck a plain back. I would have told you that decorated backs appear very late in the history of cards (18th Century) but I'd have been wrong. Cards were getting decorated backs almost from the very beginning. In this case, however, with no examples to draw from I elected to go with a plain back. It was the most common back choice.
Next for this deck is restoring the original color scheme and putting the correct unter of bells in. When I do that I plan to lighten the color of the background a little because medieval paper makers were quite proficient and the yellowed texture above just doesn't reflect their abilities.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
At a loss for words
As the title says, I am at a loss for words. I found out a couple of days ago that Will McLean, Galleron de Cresy, was very ill. Yesterday I found out his battle with cancer had taken a turn for the worse and he was home and in hospice care. Well... home and in hospice care AND with plans to go to a local event and portray a convalescent. Probably with the same thoughtfulness and dedication to historical accuracy and inventiveness that he brought to pretty much everything I saw him do.
Not that I ever got to see him in person. Not that I'm aware of. I knew of him through the internet. He introduced me to the idea of commonplace books. To the ideas behind the forms of tournament combat. To the fun of historical recreation. And I know he had similar, and greater, effects on many other people.
The saying is that a man's not gone while people still speak his name. Will McLean will be around for a very long time. God keep him and comfort his.
Not that I ever got to see him in person. Not that I'm aware of. I knew of him through the internet. He introduced me to the idea of commonplace books. To the ideas behind the forms of tournament combat. To the fun of historical recreation. And I know he had similar, and greater, effects on many other people.
The saying is that a man's not gone while people still speak his name. Will McLean will be around for a very long time. God keep him and comfort his.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Playing Cards - Swiss and German
I started researching playing cards because I wanted some cards that were appropriate for late 14th Century Spain and I particularly wanted to have cards that were appropriate for both Christian and Muslim Spain. That led me to the Mamluk deck held by the Topkapi museum in Istanbul which led me to... Switzerland?
Pretty much. I'm fond of saying that you can learn a lot about something by looking at its shadow and in this case that meant broadening my search to move away from Islamic/Spanish playing cards to Medieval/Renaissance playing cards in general. Which turned up this:
These are part of a 16th Century deck from Basel. You can find variation on this design from the 15th to the 18th Centuries and they've been reprinted in the 20th and 21st Centuries. And once I started trying to understand this deck I was lost. You see, the Swiss and the Germans took to playing cards with a zeal that doesn't border on ferocious because ferocious is so far back in the rearview mirror you couldn't see it from the top of a very high peak. I've counted over 27 different suits used in Swiss/German cards from the 15th to 17th Centuries and I'm positive I haven't found them all. The study of playing cards really is something of a rabbit hole.
This deck was unique in that it was complete. That's a rare thing to find. There can't be more than ten decks from before the 17th Century that are complete. There are a lot of partial decks (and partial cards, for that matter) but none are complete. And the imagery of this deck appealed to me. Probably because it's very simple in comparison to some of the other decks. So I decided to make some.
Early experiments were interesting. I quickly determined that hand drawing these cards was not going to work for me. Almost as quickly I determined that making these cards on authentic paper, with proper paints was a) beyond my artistic skills and b) going to be very expensive. That wasn't good. I wanted to make a little money at this, yes, but I also wanted a bunch of people to be able to use these cards.
In Image 3 and Image 4 you can see some cards I made in a compromise technique. I printed the designs onto 150gsm paper (a cardstock) and then glued the printed sheet to a backing sheet to make a 300gsm sheet of cards that I then cut out by hand. All I can see here are the failures. The unter/under/jack of bells in Image 3 clearly shows the cards are too large in relation to the artwork. In Image 1 we can see the artwork nearly fills the entire card and in other surviving decks/cards we can see the artwork is sometimes cut off because it was so close to the edge. These cards were way too thick. I think. We don't have a lot of information on how thick the cards actually were, but I think these are way too thick. They're also black and white. If you see a surviving deck in black and white that's because it was a printer's reject sheet that was recycled for something else. Cards were colored. By hand, by stencil, by whatever method. But they were colored.
Ultimately I decided to go with a professional printing service. I chose a print on demand service because I had no money to pay for a small print run (500 decks). That drove up the cost of each deck but kept the price fairly low and allowed me to ensure the cards remained available without having to do another print run if I ran out of cards from the first run (ha!). After experimenting I ended up choosing Printer's Studio and got my first set of cards.
I like the way the cards turned out, but everything about them is a problem. The colors are perceived by customers as being too bright. I'll admit the palette could benefit from some tweaking to more closely approximate surviving examples, but indications are that Medieval painting *was* quite bright. The cards are too white for a lot of people; they don't convey that 'olde tyme' feeling that sepia-toned paper does. Again, Medieval paper was frequently coated with a mixture of starch (binder) and chalk (pigment) to make it whiter and smoother. Frankly, Medieval paper was frequently of a higher quality than the wood pulp stuff we commonly use now. The margins around the artwork were unavoidable. Modern printers simply won't accept the losses that Medieval printers were willing to accept and they demand quite a large margin around the artwork. The rounded corners are, in my mind, even worse. Medieval playing cards had square corners. This deck has a patterned back. That's one of the benefits of using a professional printing service. I could never have done uniform backs on my own.
In Image 6 you can see 10 of the almost 30 suits I put together from documented examples. Well.... almost. When I made the swords and coins I thought I was being.... creative. You see, swords and coins are part of the Latin-style card decks and aren't Swiss/German at all. Except they turned out to be Swiss/Italian and very well documented. I've changed the designs and the layout to more accurately reflect the historical examples and added cups and batons/staves as well. To the right you can see some examples of card backs that I experimented with.
So what are you seeing? The Swiss/German deck layout typically has pip cards (the number cards) from 2 to 9. There is no one/1/ace. In the Swiss influenced decks the ten is typically a banner bearing the suit symbol and an X serving as a Roman numeral ten. In the German influenced decks the ten is generally another pip card (ten suit symbols) with a Roman number ten somewhere on the card (typically the middle of the card or the top of the card). The ten in both decks frequently serves the same purpose as the ace in modern decks. In the example above you can see modern style aces. I added those to make the deck more flexible; you can set them aside to play period games or include them to play modern games. The court cards are an unter/under, ober/over, and konig/king. The unter is the equivalent of the jack and he is the under because the suit symbol is low on his card. The ober is the equivalent of the queen and his the over because the suit symobl is high on his card. The king is seated upon a throne and wears a crown. He also wears a long robe which is a detail that becomes important when dealing with the French decks.
Pretty much. I'm fond of saying that you can learn a lot about something by looking at its shadow and in this case that meant broadening my search to move away from Islamic/Spanish playing cards to Medieval/Renaissance playing cards in general. Which turned up this:
Image 1
Image 2
Image 2
These are part of a 16th Century deck from Basel. You can find variation on this design from the 15th to the 18th Centuries and they've been reprinted in the 20th and 21st Centuries. And once I started trying to understand this deck I was lost. You see, the Swiss and the Germans took to playing cards with a zeal that doesn't border on ferocious because ferocious is so far back in the rearview mirror you couldn't see it from the top of a very high peak. I've counted over 27 different suits used in Swiss/German cards from the 15th to 17th Centuries and I'm positive I haven't found them all. The study of playing cards really is something of a rabbit hole.
This deck was unique in that it was complete. That's a rare thing to find. There can't be more than ten decks from before the 17th Century that are complete. There are a lot of partial decks (and partial cards, for that matter) but none are complete. And the imagery of this deck appealed to me. Probably because it's very simple in comparison to some of the other decks. So I decided to make some.
Early experiments were interesting. I quickly determined that hand drawing these cards was not going to work for me. Almost as quickly I determined that making these cards on authentic paper, with proper paints was a) beyond my artistic skills and b) going to be very expensive. That wasn't good. I wanted to make a little money at this, yes, but I also wanted a bunch of people to be able to use these cards.
Image 3
Image 4
In Image 3 and Image 4 you can see some cards I made in a compromise technique. I printed the designs onto 150gsm paper (a cardstock) and then glued the printed sheet to a backing sheet to make a 300gsm sheet of cards that I then cut out by hand. All I can see here are the failures. The unter/under/jack of bells in Image 3 clearly shows the cards are too large in relation to the artwork. In Image 1 we can see the artwork nearly fills the entire card and in other surviving decks/cards we can see the artwork is sometimes cut off because it was so close to the edge. These cards were way too thick. I think. We don't have a lot of information on how thick the cards actually were, but I think these are way too thick. They're also black and white. If you see a surviving deck in black and white that's because it was a printer's reject sheet that was recycled for something else. Cards were colored. By hand, by stencil, by whatever method. But they were colored.
Ultimately I decided to go with a professional printing service. I chose a print on demand service because I had no money to pay for a small print run (500 decks). That drove up the cost of each deck but kept the price fairly low and allowed me to ensure the cards remained available without having to do another print run if I ran out of cards from the first run (ha!). After experimenting I ended up choosing Printer's Studio and got my first set of cards.
Image 5
I like the way the cards turned out, but everything about them is a problem. The colors are perceived by customers as being too bright. I'll admit the palette could benefit from some tweaking to more closely approximate surviving examples, but indications are that Medieval painting *was* quite bright. The cards are too white for a lot of people; they don't convey that 'olde tyme' feeling that sepia-toned paper does. Again, Medieval paper was frequently coated with a mixture of starch (binder) and chalk (pigment) to make it whiter and smoother. Frankly, Medieval paper was frequently of a higher quality than the wood pulp stuff we commonly use now. The margins around the artwork were unavoidable. Modern printers simply won't accept the losses that Medieval printers were willing to accept and they demand quite a large margin around the artwork. The rounded corners are, in my mind, even worse. Medieval playing cards had square corners. This deck has a patterned back. That's one of the benefits of using a professional printing service. I could never have done uniform backs on my own.
Image 6
In Image 6 you can see 10 of the almost 30 suits I put together from documented examples. Well.... almost. When I made the swords and coins I thought I was being.... creative. You see, swords and coins are part of the Latin-style card decks and aren't Swiss/German at all. Except they turned out to be Swiss/Italian and very well documented. I've changed the designs and the layout to more accurately reflect the historical examples and added cups and batons/staves as well. To the right you can see some examples of card backs that I experimented with.
So what are you seeing? The Swiss/German deck layout typically has pip cards (the number cards) from 2 to 9. There is no one/1/ace. In the Swiss influenced decks the ten is typically a banner bearing the suit symbol and an X serving as a Roman numeral ten. In the German influenced decks the ten is generally another pip card (ten suit symbols) with a Roman number ten somewhere on the card (typically the middle of the card or the top of the card). The ten in both decks frequently serves the same purpose as the ace in modern decks. In the example above you can see modern style aces. I added those to make the deck more flexible; you can set them aside to play period games or include them to play modern games. The court cards are an unter/under, ober/over, and konig/king. The unter is the equivalent of the jack and he is the under because the suit symbol is low on his card. The ober is the equivalent of the queen and his the over because the suit symobl is high on his card. The king is seated upon a throne and wears a crown. He also wears a long robe which is a detail that becomes important when dealing with the French decks.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Some Musings on Tables Games in the Medieval Islamic World
This is just me rambling and thinking out loud.
Before I start thinking let me address one point: I'm going to use the term Backgammon. That term refers to one, and only one, variant of the many different games that could be played on a tables board. In the Middle Ages that particular variant was known by many different names, Todas Tablas, Tric-Trac, and Irish to name just three. When I use the term 'backgammon' in this post I'm referring to tables games in general.
Backgammon has a long history in the Islamic world. I find numerous specific references to it dating back to the 10th Century. There were books and poems written about the game, none of which, alas, seem to have survived. I'm pretty sure we're going to find more substantive references to the game as more and more manuscripts become more widely available to members of the public and that's something to look forward to.
We also know, in passing, that the four major schools of the 10th Century all considered backgammon to be haram (forbidden) on various grounds. But books and poems and pictures of princes playing the game! Despite the fact that it was officially forbidden by Islam the game was very popular. And that's one of the very interesting things about backgammon in the Islamic world. And it appears to have carried over to the Christian world in a least one case. If you look at Alfonso X's Book of Games you can't find an illustration of a Muslim playing backgammon or dice. Chess yes, the other games no. Correct me if I'm wrong, I could very well be mistaken. We also know that many of the tafurerias (gambling halls) were located in the Moorish ghettos of Christian Spain.
It seems that backgammon was a tolerated vice that could be cracked down on whenever a new ruler ascended the throne.
Jurists considered that backgammon was haram because it was gambling and because it took time away from the study of the Quran. Counter-arguments were advanced that it was possible to play without gambling. That was countered with the argument that the use of dice made it inherently a game of chance. Curiously, Islam doesn't seem to have adopted the various variations of the game that allow a player to declare his rolls and turn backgammon into a game of pure skill.
A few of the mentions of backgammon that do survive clearly consider that chance plays a strong role in the game. In fact, one of the surviving backgammon origin myths states that backgammon precedes chess and was developed by a courtier to teach an Indian king that a man could only operate within the confines of fate; a fatalistic approach to life. The tale goes on to say that another courtier invented chess to counter the first courtier and teach his king that man controlled his own fate. If this point of view held any sort of sway I would expect backgammon to be far more popular, and licit, than chess in the medieval Islamic world. My personal experiences with Islam have found a strong thread of fatalism within it: Inshallah. The idea that a man can only work within the limits of the will of God would seem a good match with Islam.
Modern Islamic thought has taken a slightly different view. Some of the extreme fundamentalists consider all games haram, some of the traditionalists consider chess okay while games that invoke an element of chance (dice, cards) are still forbidden, and some schools hold that backgammon, and even cards, are allowed so long as they do not involve competition for stakes or take time away from prayers.
We've got illustrations of early Islamic backgammon boards going back to the 14th Century, yet I haven't found a single Islamic example from earlier than the 17th Century and they all seem to follow the Western mode of design. The sole exception is an 18th Century Kashmiri board I found. Absolutely stunning in design and execution and it follows the model of early Persian boads.
One aspect I think we ought to bring to any recreation of medieval Islamic backgammon play is the use of the cup for the dice. The use of the cup, ornate or plain as conditions merit, pleases my sensibilities and sets the game apart, providing us with a trigger that says 'this is not a Western game that I am currently playing'. The use of the cup also argues against the traditional opening of Shesh-Besh where each player throws a single die and the high roller then has to use the dice that have been thrown for his opening move. Shesh-Besh in fact means Six-Five and is the best opening roll possible.
Before I start thinking let me address one point: I'm going to use the term Backgammon. That term refers to one, and only one, variant of the many different games that could be played on a tables board. In the Middle Ages that particular variant was known by many different names, Todas Tablas, Tric-Trac, and Irish to name just three. When I use the term 'backgammon' in this post I'm referring to tables games in general.
Backgammon has a long history in the Islamic world. I find numerous specific references to it dating back to the 10th Century. There were books and poems written about the game, none of which, alas, seem to have survived. I'm pretty sure we're going to find more substantive references to the game as more and more manuscripts become more widely available to members of the public and that's something to look forward to.
We also know, in passing, that the four major schools of the 10th Century all considered backgammon to be haram (forbidden) on various grounds. But books and poems and pictures of princes playing the game! Despite the fact that it was officially forbidden by Islam the game was very popular. And that's one of the very interesting things about backgammon in the Islamic world. And it appears to have carried over to the Christian world in a least one case. If you look at Alfonso X's Book of Games you can't find an illustration of a Muslim playing backgammon or dice. Chess yes, the other games no. Correct me if I'm wrong, I could very well be mistaken. We also know that many of the tafurerias (gambling halls) were located in the Moorish ghettos of Christian Spain.
It seems that backgammon was a tolerated vice that could be cracked down on whenever a new ruler ascended the throne.
Jurists considered that backgammon was haram because it was gambling and because it took time away from the study of the Quran. Counter-arguments were advanced that it was possible to play without gambling. That was countered with the argument that the use of dice made it inherently a game of chance. Curiously, Islam doesn't seem to have adopted the various variations of the game that allow a player to declare his rolls and turn backgammon into a game of pure skill.
A few of the mentions of backgammon that do survive clearly consider that chance plays a strong role in the game. In fact, one of the surviving backgammon origin myths states that backgammon precedes chess and was developed by a courtier to teach an Indian king that a man could only operate within the confines of fate; a fatalistic approach to life. The tale goes on to say that another courtier invented chess to counter the first courtier and teach his king that man controlled his own fate. If this point of view held any sort of sway I would expect backgammon to be far more popular, and licit, than chess in the medieval Islamic world. My personal experiences with Islam have found a strong thread of fatalism within it: Inshallah. The idea that a man can only work within the limits of the will of God would seem a good match with Islam.
Modern Islamic thought has taken a slightly different view. Some of the extreme fundamentalists consider all games haram, some of the traditionalists consider chess okay while games that invoke an element of chance (dice, cards) are still forbidden, and some schools hold that backgammon, and even cards, are allowed so long as they do not involve competition for stakes or take time away from prayers.
We've got illustrations of early Islamic backgammon boards going back to the 14th Century, yet I haven't found a single Islamic example from earlier than the 17th Century and they all seem to follow the Western mode of design. The sole exception is an 18th Century Kashmiri board I found. Absolutely stunning in design and execution and it follows the model of early Persian boads.
One aspect I think we ought to bring to any recreation of medieval Islamic backgammon play is the use of the cup for the dice. The use of the cup, ornate or plain as conditions merit, pleases my sensibilities and sets the game apart, providing us with a trigger that says 'this is not a Western game that I am currently playing'. The use of the cup also argues against the traditional opening of Shesh-Besh where each player throws a single die and the high roller then has to use the dice that have been thrown for his opening move. Shesh-Besh in fact means Six-Five and is the best opening roll possible.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Islamic Backgammon
I finally have enough data points to say I'm confident that a version of modern backgammon (actually Todas Tablas which is slightly different) was played in the Islamic world as far back as the 14th Century. We know tables games, of which Backgammon/Todas Tablas was one version, were played in the Islamic world. In fact, origin tales in the Muslim world claim the game was invented in Persia sometime around the 6th Century. In the 9th Century the Persian/Egyptian poet Abu Nuwas waxed his bad boy credentials by poetically bragging about how he whiled away the days of Ramadan playing chess and backgammon. In the 11th Century the Persian poet Ferdowsi credits Burzoe/Buzurjmihr with the invention mentioned above. We also have accounts from various jurists from the 10th to 17th Centuries who comment on whether or not the game is haram (forbidden to Muslims, and they tend to agree that it is haram).
There are a number of terms for the game depending on when and where you look. The game is called Nard, or some version thereof (narde, nardi, and etc...), in Persian or Frangieh (which apparently means Frankish/French) in Arabic. There are also variations of the game which are mentioned after the 16th Century. I will mention that Mabouseh (mahbusa) is a game popular from the 17th Century to the current day in the Middle East and is played exactly as a game described in Alfonso X's book of games from the 13th Century. It's likely that game was played in the Middle East prior to the 16th Century but I can't confirm that.
Neither can I absolutely confirm that a game almost identical to modern backgammon was played. BUT, the evidence strongly supports the assertion that it was. Let me lay this out for you. Language is tricky and I cannot offer any written evidence that the tables game reference in the writings above is modern backgammon. I have, therefore, relied upon visual sources. There are three images in particular.
Image 1 is a very early 14th Century image held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can see it here. This is a relation of the origin myth of backgammon showing the diplomat/adviser Burzoe instructing the King of India in the game. The game pieces are red and black on a white board (which is interesting in and of itself) and the pieces are distributed in a fashion that very strongly resembles the starting distribution of pieces in modern backgammon.
Image 2 is a close up of a 15th Century illumination in the Anthology of Baysunghur in the Berenson Collection in the Villa I Tatti. Here we see princes playing at tables and, again, the distribution of the pieces very strongly resembles the starting distribution of pieces in modern backgammon.
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Finally we have Image 3 which is a 16th Century Turkish illumination depicting Burzoe demonstrating chess to King Khusraw. This piece is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Note, again, the distribution of pieces.
The distribution of pieces is important because it is unique amongst the games that we know about and we have a fairly extensive knowledge of tables games from European sources. This distribution is highly unlikely, but not impossible, to occur playing any of the other variations of tables games. On this basis I feel confident that someone at an SCA event playing modern backgammon, leaving out the doubling cube and the doubles rule, would not be far wrong at all.
Before I end this I'd like to point out a couple of other things I find interesting. Some of you will have noted the distinctive shape of the boards which visually distinguishes them from European style boards. You may also have noted the cups in the center of the boards in Image 1 and 2. I speculate that this cup was used for the dice and they were either cast into it or kept in the cup and the entire cup shaken and then set down. And last, since all the scenes depict the rich and powerful the boards are, accordingly, quite large. I have no idea what boards for the less wealthy might have looked like. These images don't provide us with any evidence for the number of dice that would be used in play. I suspect two dice were used based on the listing of backgammon equipment provided by the 10th Century writer Mas'udi, but I cannot be certain of this number of the basis of this sparse evidence.
I also want to remind you that I have the rules for many tables games and, more importantly, the sources they are derived from in a PDF booklet here. You can find a set of rules for Todas Tablas, which is the game I believe we are seeing, in this booklet.
There are a number of terms for the game depending on when and where you look. The game is called Nard, or some version thereof (narde, nardi, and etc...), in Persian or Frangieh (which apparently means Frankish/French) in Arabic. There are also variations of the game which are mentioned after the 16th Century. I will mention that Mabouseh (mahbusa) is a game popular from the 17th Century to the current day in the Middle East and is played exactly as a game described in Alfonso X's book of games from the 13th Century. It's likely that game was played in the Middle East prior to the 16th Century but I can't confirm that.
Neither can I absolutely confirm that a game almost identical to modern backgammon was played. BUT, the evidence strongly supports the assertion that it was. Let me lay this out for you. Language is tricky and I cannot offer any written evidence that the tables game reference in the writings above is modern backgammon. I have, therefore, relied upon visual sources. There are three images in particular.
Image 1
Image 1 is a very early 14th Century image held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can see it here. This is a relation of the origin myth of backgammon showing the diplomat/adviser Burzoe instructing the King of India in the game. The game pieces are red and black on a white board (which is interesting in and of itself) and the pieces are distributed in a fashion that very strongly resembles the starting distribution of pieces in modern backgammon.
Image 2
Image 2 is a close up of a 15th Century illumination in the Anthology of Baysunghur in the Berenson Collection in the Villa I Tatti. Here we see princes playing at tables and, again, the distribution of the pieces very strongly resembles the starting distribution of pieces in modern backgammon.
Image 3
Finally we have Image 3 which is a 16th Century Turkish illumination depicting Burzoe demonstrating chess to King Khusraw. This piece is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Note, again, the distribution of pieces.
The distribution of pieces is important because it is unique amongst the games that we know about and we have a fairly extensive knowledge of tables games from European sources. This distribution is highly unlikely, but not impossible, to occur playing any of the other variations of tables games. On this basis I feel confident that someone at an SCA event playing modern backgammon, leaving out the doubling cube and the doubles rule, would not be far wrong at all.
Before I end this I'd like to point out a couple of other things I find interesting. Some of you will have noted the distinctive shape of the boards which visually distinguishes them from European style boards. You may also have noted the cups in the center of the boards in Image 1 and 2. I speculate that this cup was used for the dice and they were either cast into it or kept in the cup and the entire cup shaken and then set down. And last, since all the scenes depict the rich and powerful the boards are, accordingly, quite large. I have no idea what boards for the less wealthy might have looked like. These images don't provide us with any evidence for the number of dice that would be used in play. I suspect two dice were used based on the listing of backgammon equipment provided by the 10th Century writer Mas'udi, but I cannot be certain of this number of the basis of this sparse evidence.
I also want to remind you that I have the rules for many tables games and, more importantly, the sources they are derived from in a PDF booklet here. You can find a set of rules for Todas Tablas, which is the game I believe we are seeing, in this booklet.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Tables Games
As I've noted, my commonplace book of a blog has become more of a diary than an actual commonplace book. That function, gathering together useful bits of information, has been taken over by Google Drive. I really like Google Drive.
But in looking back on my posts (both of them) I saw that I had started talking about backgammon and tables games and never really finished. I have finished. I've compiled a bunch of references and learned quite a lot about tables games in the Middle Ages. Long before playing cards make their appearance in the 14th Century and become wildly popular in the 15th tables games were cock of the walk. Chess, being entirely based on skill, was popular primarily with the upper classes. Dice, being entirely based on luck (unless you were cheating), was popular primarily with the lower classes. The relative costs of the gaming equipment required helped to cement this. Tables games, on the third hand, combined elements of chance and skill in varying degrees and were wildly popular with both segments of the population.
I've compiled the rules for 19 distinct tables games (which includes Backgammon) and an additional 5 variations on those games. My list is by no means exhaustive but I think I've hit on the more common games and variants for which rules are available. Rather than type everything out, again, I'm just going to point you to the booklet I prepared:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15SAMYZtejMV3VVNllCME95U2M/view?usp=sharing
And now I'll offer some random comments:
-Although it seems strange, I really like the games that allow you to declare your rolls rather than actually rolling dice. While this eliminates chance from the game, it's very interesting to occasionally play tables games as exercises in pure skill.
-I was fascinated to discover that people would set up tables game problems, like chess or go problems, and then wager that people couldn't solve the problems. These were, again, pure skill puzzles and trying to understand and solve them seems like an exercise in touching the middle ages.
-Although the booklet doesn't cover game boards, I think finding the wide variety of gameboards out there was one of the bigger pleasures of my research. They varied from humble scratchings on wood and ivory to massively inlaid treasures. The variations in design were also interesting to see.
-The sheer variety of games, and the complexity of the rules, was astounding. The booklet was less an attempt to share my research than it was to make a document I could refer to in order to refresh my memory when I wanted to play a game. In looking at these games, and early playing card games, I am struck by how much time the players must have been taking. In general it seems that the idea of a quick game was known but not entirely popular.
-Fallas threw me for a loop. I didn't understand it at all until I realized it's a game that's played to not lose rather than to win. I've never played a game of this that ended with someone getting all their pieces off the board. Positioning yourself to have lots of moves, and to take away your opponent's ability to move, is the object of the game and players who realize this tend to win.
-I *REALLY* want to find a documented game from the Islamic Middle Ages. We know the game was played (my favorite reference is a poet establishing his bad-boy cred by boasting about how he whiles away the days of Ramadan playing tables games) but we don't know the exact rules of any of the games they played. I used two modern games with long established (18th Century) roots and one game I made up by using common rules and a starting position found in a 14th Century Persian illustration.
But in looking back on my posts (both of them) I saw that I had started talking about backgammon and tables games and never really finished. I have finished. I've compiled a bunch of references and learned quite a lot about tables games in the Middle Ages. Long before playing cards make their appearance in the 14th Century and become wildly popular in the 15th tables games were cock of the walk. Chess, being entirely based on skill, was popular primarily with the upper classes. Dice, being entirely based on luck (unless you were cheating), was popular primarily with the lower classes. The relative costs of the gaming equipment required helped to cement this. Tables games, on the third hand, combined elements of chance and skill in varying degrees and were wildly popular with both segments of the population.
I've compiled the rules for 19 distinct tables games (which includes Backgammon) and an additional 5 variations on those games. My list is by no means exhaustive but I think I've hit on the more common games and variants for which rules are available. Rather than type everything out, again, I'm just going to point you to the booklet I prepared:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15SAMYZtejMV3VVNllCME95U2M/view?usp=sharing
And now I'll offer some random comments:
-Although it seems strange, I really like the games that allow you to declare your rolls rather than actually rolling dice. While this eliminates chance from the game, it's very interesting to occasionally play tables games as exercises in pure skill.
-I was fascinated to discover that people would set up tables game problems, like chess or go problems, and then wager that people couldn't solve the problems. These were, again, pure skill puzzles and trying to understand and solve them seems like an exercise in touching the middle ages.
-Although the booklet doesn't cover game boards, I think finding the wide variety of gameboards out there was one of the bigger pleasures of my research. They varied from humble scratchings on wood and ivory to massively inlaid treasures. The variations in design were also interesting to see.
-The sheer variety of games, and the complexity of the rules, was astounding. The booklet was less an attempt to share my research than it was to make a document I could refer to in order to refresh my memory when I wanted to play a game. In looking at these games, and early playing card games, I am struck by how much time the players must have been taking. In general it seems that the idea of a quick game was known but not entirely popular.
-Fallas threw me for a loop. I didn't understand it at all until I realized it's a game that's played to not lose rather than to win. I've never played a game of this that ended with someone getting all their pieces off the board. Positioning yourself to have lots of moves, and to take away your opponent's ability to move, is the object of the game and players who realize this tend to win.
-I *REALLY* want to find a documented game from the Islamic Middle Ages. We know the game was played (my favorite reference is a poet establishing his bad-boy cred by boasting about how he whiles away the days of Ramadan playing tables games) but we don't know the exact rules of any of the games they played. I used two modern games with long established (18th Century) roots and one game I made up by using common rules and a starting position found in a 14th Century Persian illustration.
Monday, June 15, 2015
More playing cards. Paper, again.
Remember how I said the paper in playing cards was linen? Yeah, about that... With the caveat that we're talking about a very large geographical area and time frame: I was wrong. Linen is only number two on the list of materials. It appears that hemp is number one on the list. I thought that linen rags constituted the largest ingredient that went into making paper but in fact it's the hemp material from sails and, more importantly, ropes that constituted the largest ingredient.
Again, big time frame and geographic area, but it appears that hemp is far and away the primary ingredient, supplemented by linen, and then by various other materials. In every case the materials that went into paper were waste materials from other processes or products. Mulberry material has been found in some papers, for example, and this was probably waste from the silk industry in Southern Europe. Cotton fiber is mentioned as an ingredient, but the tow (the short fibers) rather than the long fiber material (called flax fibers) used for making clothing. This from a source on Islamic paper composition. I've even heard allegations, but not yet seen the references for myself, that hair and other waste fibers from animals went into paper production.
While the natural inclination, okay, my inclination, would be to assume that such paper would be rough and very much off-white and possessed of numerous irregularities this was apparently not the case. Pulping was a very organized, if labor intensive, process with strict quality control. Bleaching was a known process and was practiced. Water was filtered to prevent contaminants from entering the process. Paper was pressed, rolled/polished, and even given surface finishes using chalk. One of the English conservation organizations I looked at noted that medieval paper, when new, bore a strong resemblance to 80gsm white printer paper in appearance and texture. Colored paper was even in use.
Yeah, I know, you want references. This blog isn't really about those; it's more of a place where I collect and share some of my thoughts and ideas. Here are a few links:
http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php
https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199903/revolution.by.the.ream-a.history.of.paper.htm
http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/books/Gaur-1994-Calligraphy/Gaur-1994-Calligraphy-032-055.pdf
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/collectioncare/2015/04/making-islamic-style-paper.html
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/COMST/Bulletin1/pp69-70.pdf
I've been working with playing cards for several years now and I'm approaching what I consider a position of enlightened ignorance (I'm becoming aware of just how little I actually know). I have experimented with techniques and I continue to experiment with techniques and I'll share some of the results here when I have the time and inclination. For the past few years I've sort of been confined to doing print on demand using modern printers and modern materials. Now I'm looking at moving past that and producing cards that are printed on paper that's more closely authentic. In that search I've been looking for hemp, linen, and cotton papers of 300gsm that's not a brilliant white and is mostly smooth/polished. It's been difficult to find at reasonable prices. There are any number of high-end craft manufacturers out there who have been in business since the 17th or 18th centuries and will charge you accordingly (or so it seems) but more affordable paper has been hard to find. Still, I keep looking.
I'm updating this because I've done more research but I don't want to start a new post. I read a good analogy: Trying to describe paper-making during the Middle Ages is like trying to describe cheese-making during the Middle Ages. That really sums it up. Indications are that paper-making was a sophisticated process (which means it had a lot of techniques to choose from and lots of ways those techniques could be varied) and the products produced by paper-makers could vary widely, even from the same manufacturer. The documented sorting of fibers meant that manufacturers typically produced at least three grades of paper. Treatment options for rags prior to pulping could lead to large variations in color. Variations in sizing (soaking the paper in gelatin and, possibly, other substances) could lead to differences in appearance and the way the paper reacted to inks. And post manufacturing treatments such as burnishing could produce different textures. All of this means that there's no effective way to say what paper for Medieval playing cards should have looked like.
I'm updating this again. Remember, kids, always check the references. Always.
http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/index.php#
This website has a link to their collection which has a large sampling of historical papers from the 14th Century on.
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/search/collection/paper/order/date
In looking through this I find that the average thickness of 14th-15th Century papers is: 0.22mm
Now I can check that with a reference source on paper weight (thickness).
http://www.paper-paper.com/weight.html
That tells me the paper in question is about a 199gsm
For comparison that's a modern cardstock. That's almost as thick as the cardboard that makes up a box of breakfast cereal. Because it is paper, not cardboard, however, it is considerably less stiff. This is not as thick as premium calling-card stock, for instance. By way of comparison, common copier/printer paper is usually around 70gsm. That means these historical sheets of paper are almost three times as thick.
Again, big time frame and geographic area, but it appears that hemp is far and away the primary ingredient, supplemented by linen, and then by various other materials. In every case the materials that went into paper were waste materials from other processes or products. Mulberry material has been found in some papers, for example, and this was probably waste from the silk industry in Southern Europe. Cotton fiber is mentioned as an ingredient, but the tow (the short fibers) rather than the long fiber material (called flax fibers) used for making clothing. This from a source on Islamic paper composition. I've even heard allegations, but not yet seen the references for myself, that hair and other waste fibers from animals went into paper production.
While the natural inclination, okay, my inclination, would be to assume that such paper would be rough and very much off-white and possessed of numerous irregularities this was apparently not the case. Pulping was a very organized, if labor intensive, process with strict quality control. Bleaching was a known process and was practiced. Water was filtered to prevent contaminants from entering the process. Paper was pressed, rolled/polished, and even given surface finishes using chalk. One of the English conservation organizations I looked at noted that medieval paper, when new, bore a strong resemblance to 80gsm white printer paper in appearance and texture. Colored paper was even in use.
Yeah, I know, you want references. This blog isn't really about those; it's more of a place where I collect and share some of my thoughts and ideas. Here are a few links:
http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php
https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199903/revolution.by.the.ream-a.history.of.paper.htm
http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/books/Gaur-1994-Calligraphy/Gaur-1994-Calligraphy-032-055.pdf
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/collectioncare/2015/04/making-islamic-style-paper.html
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/COMST/Bulletin1/pp69-70.pdf
I've been working with playing cards for several years now and I'm approaching what I consider a position of enlightened ignorance (I'm becoming aware of just how little I actually know). I have experimented with techniques and I continue to experiment with techniques and I'll share some of the results here when I have the time and inclination. For the past few years I've sort of been confined to doing print on demand using modern printers and modern materials. Now I'm looking at moving past that and producing cards that are printed on paper that's more closely authentic. In that search I've been looking for hemp, linen, and cotton papers of 300gsm that's not a brilliant white and is mostly smooth/polished. It's been difficult to find at reasonable prices. There are any number of high-end craft manufacturers out there who have been in business since the 17th or 18th centuries and will charge you accordingly (or so it seems) but more affordable paper has been hard to find. Still, I keep looking.
I'm updating this because I've done more research but I don't want to start a new post. I read a good analogy: Trying to describe paper-making during the Middle Ages is like trying to describe cheese-making during the Middle Ages. That really sums it up. Indications are that paper-making was a sophisticated process (which means it had a lot of techniques to choose from and lots of ways those techniques could be varied) and the products produced by paper-makers could vary widely, even from the same manufacturer. The documented sorting of fibers meant that manufacturers typically produced at least three grades of paper. Treatment options for rags prior to pulping could lead to large variations in color. Variations in sizing (soaking the paper in gelatin and, possibly, other substances) could lead to differences in appearance and the way the paper reacted to inks. And post manufacturing treatments such as burnishing could produce different textures. All of this means that there's no effective way to say what paper for Medieval playing cards should have looked like.
I'm updating this again. Remember, kids, always check the references. Always.
http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/index.php#
This website has a link to their collection which has a large sampling of historical papers from the 14th Century on.
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/search/collection/paper/order/date
In looking through this I find that the average thickness of 14th-15th Century papers is: 0.22mm
Now I can check that with a reference source on paper weight (thickness).
http://www.paper-paper.com/weight.html
That tells me the paper in question is about a 199gsm
For comparison that's a modern cardstock. That's almost as thick as the cardboard that makes up a box of breakfast cereal. Because it is paper, not cardboard, however, it is considerably less stiff. This is not as thick as premium calling-card stock, for instance. By way of comparison, common copier/printer paper is usually around 70gsm. That means these historical sheets of paper are almost three times as thick.
Faux Ivory Inlay
The 14th Century (The One, True Century) was the ivory age. Just about anything that could be made of ivory was. If it wasn't made with ivory it was adorned with ivory. There are a lot of fascinating political and economic insights to be drawn from this but that's not what I'm here for. I'm going to talk about some of the difficulties this presents in recreating aspects of material culture and I'm going to talk about some ways to overcome this.
If you are a strict recreationist you need to stop reading now. You see, all faux ivory is plastic. There are exceptions, tagua nut makes a fine ivory alternative and so does bone. Tagua nuts are small and really unsuitable for inlay or larger works. Bone is the preferred alternative and was in the middle ages. There are even laws prohibiting people from passing bone off as ivory. So if you really want to be highly accurate in your portrayals/recreatons, bone is the way to go.
I have found bone to be difficult to work with. The dust needs to be kept out of your eyes and lungs, the smell of it when cutting is unpleasant, and it's a fairly brittle material particularly when you cut it very thin as you need to do for inlay. It's quite durable once it's inlaid, but getting it to that point... I lack the skill and patience. Plus, bone comes in very narrow sheets. If you want to make a larger piece you're going to have to join several sheets to make a large enough sheet to work with. This is authentic. And a pain in the ass.
Remember how I said that all faux-ivory products are plastic? Yep. You can buy very nice sheets of the material from many sources. But it's plastic. You can cast in ivory resins. Again, plastic. And you can use putties. Plastic again. But I find the putties are generally superior to all of the above because you can create the striations and imperfections of color found in real ivory rather than getting a uniform 'ivory white' plastic. The trick is to look for the online tutorials on making faux ivory using Sculpey modeling clay. You will find multiple approaches to this.
The technique I have used the most often involves inlay. Simply put: I used a laser to make a channel in the piece of wood. I then applied a thin bead of epoxy (super glue) within the channel. Then I pushed my ivory colored sculpey clay into the channel. I let the sculpey air dry hard then sanded the excess away. I baked the piece in an oven at low heat to harden the sculpey and I oiled the piece with linseed oil straight out of the oven to avoid cracking/warping.
This produces a very nice faux-ivory inlay in small applications. Here's a comb I made using this technique for the inlay.
If you are a strict recreationist you need to stop reading now. You see, all faux ivory is plastic. There are exceptions, tagua nut makes a fine ivory alternative and so does bone. Tagua nuts are small and really unsuitable for inlay or larger works. Bone is the preferred alternative and was in the middle ages. There are even laws prohibiting people from passing bone off as ivory. So if you really want to be highly accurate in your portrayals/recreatons, bone is the way to go.
I have found bone to be difficult to work with. The dust needs to be kept out of your eyes and lungs, the smell of it when cutting is unpleasant, and it's a fairly brittle material particularly when you cut it very thin as you need to do for inlay. It's quite durable once it's inlaid, but getting it to that point... I lack the skill and patience. Plus, bone comes in very narrow sheets. If you want to make a larger piece you're going to have to join several sheets to make a large enough sheet to work with. This is authentic. And a pain in the ass.
Remember how I said that all faux-ivory products are plastic? Yep. You can buy very nice sheets of the material from many sources. But it's plastic. You can cast in ivory resins. Again, plastic. And you can use putties. Plastic again. But I find the putties are generally superior to all of the above because you can create the striations and imperfections of color found in real ivory rather than getting a uniform 'ivory white' plastic. The trick is to look for the online tutorials on making faux ivory using Sculpey modeling clay. You will find multiple approaches to this.
The technique I have used the most often involves inlay. Simply put: I used a laser to make a channel in the piece of wood. I then applied a thin bead of epoxy (super glue) within the channel. Then I pushed my ivory colored sculpey clay into the channel. I let the sculpey air dry hard then sanded the excess away. I baked the piece in an oven at low heat to harden the sculpey and I oiled the piece with linseed oil straight out of the oven to avoid cracking/warping.
This produces a very nice faux-ivory inlay in small applications. Here's a comb I made using this technique for the inlay.
You can see the inlay worked particularly well against the darkness of the walnut. With care this process could be used for larger pieces such as tables boards (backgammon). I don't think this would be suitable for items that stand alone. The clay is significantly lighter than real ivory and lacks some of the feel. It's also substantially less durable and prone to snapping. This isn't an issue when it's inlay.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Playing Cards
I've been interested in playing cards of late. Perhaps I should say 'more interested'. I've been interested in playing cards for a while now and I made two attempts at crowd-funding two decks. Two really horrible decks. Two embarrassingly bad decks. Words fail me. And I knew it at the time which is one of the reasons I stepped away from playing cards. The other reason was that I was able to make a lot of different things and cards kind of went on the backburner.
Since then I've gotten moderately better at this. I still have all the artistic talent and skill of a rock, but through study and practice I've come to learn what Medieval/Renaissance playing cards should look like. And since I no longer had the ability to make the physical items I had been crafting it made sense to turn back to playing cards. Playing cards can be done with minimal resources and the greatest challenge is getting the composition correct. One area of the composition has consistently eluded me, however. The paper. We know the cards were made of paper. We know the paper was rag paper. We know the rags were linen. We know the paper was glued together in layers. We don't really know how thick the cards were. I blame the museums.
That's kind of a harsh statement to make and the museums might be forgiven this lapse for two reasons:
1) The cards are so thin that they need to be measured with calipers and measurements are probably in fractions of a millimeter (microns, in case you're wondering) and early collectors simply didn't take measurements of that sort. When the collections went to museums the staff probably just confirmed the existing data and moved on.
2) They've put SO MUCH information online. I have over 156 pages of notes, references, and images culled from the internet alone. That doesn't count the multiple gigabytes of data in the form of PDF files and other images. And if you add in the publications that are available to just about anyone with access to the library system of a major city and/or university... well, the world's your oyster.
So I forgive them. But I'm asking them to supply the information because it seems important. I'll talk more about that another time.
We know the definite thickness of two historical decks: the Ambras Hunting Deck and the Morisca Deck. The Ambras Hunting Deck is from the 15th Century and is extremely ornate. Each card is a hand-made painting. And the cards reflect this. Each card was prepared with a layer of gesso on the front. Possibly more than one. And the gesso was sanded and polished after it dried and then the paint was added. Consequently, each card is about 1mm thick. That's as thick as four modern playing cards stacked on each other.
The Morisca Deck dates from the very beginning of the 15th Century, possibly as early as the last decade of the 14th Century. The paper is very fragile and degraded and the cards have been glued to a backing in order to preserve them. The cards themselves are, at their thickest, 180 microns. That's 0.18 mm. That's about 75% the thickness of a modern playing card. That's slightly thicker than a dollar bill (which is also a linen paper and, so, a good comparison).
Remember that playing cards are made by gluing together multiple sheets of paper. This is necessary to achieve a degree of opacity so that players can't see the faces of the card through the backs. Solving this problem was one of the biggest issues facing cardmakers and the inability to produce a reliable back that looked the same on all 52 cards vexed them for almost a hundred years with lots of solutions being tried.
But that's a different discussion. Back to the construction of playing cards. Multiple layers glued together. But still very thin. The paper being glued together was probably about the thickness of a cash-register receipt. I consider it pretty impressive that they were making paper that thin. Every time I try to make paper it's pretty darn thick. Four or so of these sheets were glued together to form the stock upon which the cards were printed. To my mind this means the glue played a large role in determining how stiff the cards were.
There's no definite word on what types of glue were used until the 17th Century when wheatpaste was the glue of choice. I found a record from the 19th Century that said you got a gallon of glue from a pound of flour. And we know from 18th Century illustrations and descriptions that paper was glued together and then compressed in a press to get the excess liquid out. I think this process, and the linen paper used, went a long way towards making a stiff playing card. Possibly stiffer than we're used to.
So how thick were the cards, really? I've always thought they were thicker than modern playing cards because I assumed they were made on a thicker (cruder is the word I want to use) paper. But that might not be the case. Until I can get the museums to measure their cards I won't know for sure, but I was able to find multiple images of decks. Some of the earlier decks were thicker, but not all. And by the time I hit the 17th Century and what I consider reliable depictions I find that old decks were about the same thickness as modern decks.
The answer seems to be: it varies. In other words: there is no single answer. I look forward to seeing what measurements come back from the owners of the surviving cards.
Since then I've gotten moderately better at this. I still have all the artistic talent and skill of a rock, but through study and practice I've come to learn what Medieval/Renaissance playing cards should look like. And since I no longer had the ability to make the physical items I had been crafting it made sense to turn back to playing cards. Playing cards can be done with minimal resources and the greatest challenge is getting the composition correct. One area of the composition has consistently eluded me, however. The paper. We know the cards were made of paper. We know the paper was rag paper. We know the rags were linen. We know the paper was glued together in layers. We don't really know how thick the cards were. I blame the museums.
That's kind of a harsh statement to make and the museums might be forgiven this lapse for two reasons:
1) The cards are so thin that they need to be measured with calipers and measurements are probably in fractions of a millimeter (microns, in case you're wondering) and early collectors simply didn't take measurements of that sort. When the collections went to museums the staff probably just confirmed the existing data and moved on.
2) They've put SO MUCH information online. I have over 156 pages of notes, references, and images culled from the internet alone. That doesn't count the multiple gigabytes of data in the form of PDF files and other images. And if you add in the publications that are available to just about anyone with access to the library system of a major city and/or university... well, the world's your oyster.
So I forgive them. But I'm asking them to supply the information because it seems important. I'll talk more about that another time.
We know the definite thickness of two historical decks: the Ambras Hunting Deck and the Morisca Deck. The Ambras Hunting Deck is from the 15th Century and is extremely ornate. Each card is a hand-made painting. And the cards reflect this. Each card was prepared with a layer of gesso on the front. Possibly more than one. And the gesso was sanded and polished after it dried and then the paint was added. Consequently, each card is about 1mm thick. That's as thick as four modern playing cards stacked on each other.
The Morisca Deck dates from the very beginning of the 15th Century, possibly as early as the last decade of the 14th Century. The paper is very fragile and degraded and the cards have been glued to a backing in order to preserve them. The cards themselves are, at their thickest, 180 microns. That's 0.18 mm. That's about 75% the thickness of a modern playing card. That's slightly thicker than a dollar bill (which is also a linen paper and, so, a good comparison).
Remember that playing cards are made by gluing together multiple sheets of paper. This is necessary to achieve a degree of opacity so that players can't see the faces of the card through the backs. Solving this problem was one of the biggest issues facing cardmakers and the inability to produce a reliable back that looked the same on all 52 cards vexed them for almost a hundred years with lots of solutions being tried.
But that's a different discussion. Back to the construction of playing cards. Multiple layers glued together. But still very thin. The paper being glued together was probably about the thickness of a cash-register receipt. I consider it pretty impressive that they were making paper that thin. Every time I try to make paper it's pretty darn thick. Four or so of these sheets were glued together to form the stock upon which the cards were printed. To my mind this means the glue played a large role in determining how stiff the cards were.
There's no definite word on what types of glue were used until the 17th Century when wheatpaste was the glue of choice. I found a record from the 19th Century that said you got a gallon of glue from a pound of flour. And we know from 18th Century illustrations and descriptions that paper was glued together and then compressed in a press to get the excess liquid out. I think this process, and the linen paper used, went a long way towards making a stiff playing card. Possibly stiffer than we're used to.
So how thick were the cards, really? I've always thought they were thicker than modern playing cards because I assumed they were made on a thicker (cruder is the word I want to use) paper. But that might not be the case. Until I can get the museums to measure their cards I won't know for sure, but I was able to find multiple images of decks. Some of the earlier decks were thicker, but not all. And by the time I hit the 17th Century and what I consider reliable depictions I find that old decks were about the same thickness as modern decks.
The answer seems to be: it varies. In other words: there is no single answer. I look forward to seeing what measurements come back from the owners of the surviving cards.
Friday, April 17, 2015
Uh....
Yeah, almost two years since I last posted. I blame Google Docs. You see, I haven't not been doing any research. Research is about ALL I have been doing. Tables boards, pieces, rules. Cards, designs, games, and etc... Pottery. 3-D printing medieval buttons, and belt buckles, and mounts, and strap ends, and....
But why do I blame Google Docs? Because that has become my new commonplace book. As I search the internet I find images and references and documents and I grab that info and add it to a new Google Document. The main document of references I maintain on playing cards is over 150 pages long, currently. The associated files not contained in the document account for a little over 6GB. It's gotten to the point that I take pictures of items with my phone and upload them rather than trying to keep physical copies. And thanks to free scanning applications I can even translate pictures of text to text. Image viewer doesn't allow me to download a zoomed view of a medieval document? Alt+Printscreen, GIMP crop, and voila. God but I do love this modern age!
Of course, it's not all sunshine. But the clouds are mostly of my own making. When I started this (combs, I'm looking at you) I just grabbed the photo and moved on. And a couple of weeks later when I wanted to go back and do more research I had failed to note where the picture had come from and it took me a while to find it again. If I could. Yep, some pictures I've never found again. Even using the Google photo search capabilities.
So now I get the picture (really, just drag it from the screen to the Google Doc), I get the URL of the picture and put it beneath the picture, I get the URL of the page the picture appears on, and then I grab descriptive text from the page and/or add my own notes. In effect, building my own annotated reference bibliography. If the file is a PDF then I grab the info regarding that file in the same fashion and download the PDF file to Google Docs and then I add a link to my copy of the file. Voila.
Finding the information on the internet has been... interesting. There is a lot of information to find. If you aren't a member at your local museum, become one. Or join a museum you like. Because museums are digitizing their collections and making them available online and it's amazing what you can find if you're patient enough.
I separate internet searches into two levels: surface and sub-surface. Surface searches are actually enormous in scope; they are everything you can find in a Google search. The sub-surface searches are the databases accessible through the internet but not through Google itself. I usually use Google to locate these sources and then go to them and see what they hold.
Surface searches. There's a vast amount of information to be found on the web. Google will help you find it. The first thing you need to do is figure out what you're looking for. While this sounds simple, it's not always the case. The best information is frequently found in professional sources and professions sometimes have different names for things. Compile a list of your search terms and start looking. Try mixing them up. Now do the same thing in different languages. If you're researching playing cards you're going to need to use German search terms to find a lot of the best information, for example. Google Translate is your friend in finding these search terms and in getting the gist of what the foreign language documents are saying. BUT, you need to look at the foreign language documents in their original language to find more search terms.
A good way to find information rich sources is to limit the filetypes you are searching. Google will allow you to specify. My favorite document type is a PDF. This file format is the favorite of museums and researchers and document digitizers. That makes it particularly likely to contain high-quality information. I simply end any Google search with filetype:PDF and it will show me only PDF files.
Another way to quickly assess the results of a search, particularly for a foreign language, is to use the image search in Google. While it can be hard to determine if a Greek document is worth looking at on the basis of the Greek text description returned by a typical Google search, if I see an image the site contains that has, for instance, a comb, then I know I've found something worth looking at. You can also right click on a photo and have it search for other instances of the same photo (great for finding other pages that you're looking for) and visually similar images (not usually a winner but sometimes you hit the jackpot).
This process is easy to get lost in so it's good to take notes along the way. Remember what search terms you're currently using (write them down). Take notes of search terms you want to use: words, phrases, books, other references.
When you find a site that looks like it has multiple references, mine it. Google will allow you to search a specific website. Site:www.example,com will search only that site for your search terms. Sometimes you aren't meant to see other web pages within a site. You can sometimes circumvent this. Try removing the name of the webpage from the website URL and see if you get access to the info within. Example: www.example.com/motherlode/example.html becomes www.example.com/motherlode/ Fewer and fewer web administrators make this mistake, but sometimes they do. Is this hacking? Not according to the legal opinion I sought out a couple decades ago. Honestly, this technique is mostly useless these days as the Google web-crawlers tend to find these resources. But sometimes you turn over a rock and find cool stuff.
Sub-surface searches are more likely to be information rich but they can be difficult to locate sources and harder still to get access. WorldCat is a good example of a readily available database. Google does not index WorldCat so while you can find it with Google, you can't search it. WorldCat is a worldwide catalog connected to hundreds of libraries worldwide. You can use it to search in much the same way you search Google. It not only references books it references articles and online resources. It's also a great resource for Inter-Library Loans. My two library accounts allow me to sign in to World Cat from the library website and make an ILL request directly from WorldCat. My library memberships also grant me access to different databases referenced by WorldCat. A university membership might come with access to different academic databases, for instance. You'd be surprised at the places you can get membership. A one year reader's card for the Oxford Library System (hello Bodleian!) is 40 Pounds.
Museum and University sources are also great sub-surface sources to search. Many European institutions, including libraries, are digitizing their holdings. The Denver Public Library has a large database of photographs from the late 19th Century American West, for instance. I like to identify institutions that hold resources I want to examine, based on my previous searches, and then go to those sites and see if I can search them. Frequently they are free. More frequently you can get access for a small fee, particularly the European institutes. Sometimes you just need to access the database from the right source (hint: institutions which offer free access, usually European, or institutions at which you have a membership).
The databases are information rich but sometimes very difficult to search. Google Translate is your friend in finding the database, but once you're in you're generally going to have to navigate in the language of the database. Translate will help you still by allowing you to translate individual terms. It helps to think of it as an adventure. Remember that bibliographies are a great comfort in times of search. And try to come at problems from a different angle. I have found, for instance, several books that were rather expensive available for download free of charge. Why? Because they were the Master's or Doctoral theses of the authors and were published by their Universities.
Be creative, be persistent, and have fun. And that's all I've got to say about that at the moment.
But why do I blame Google Docs? Because that has become my new commonplace book. As I search the internet I find images and references and documents and I grab that info and add it to a new Google Document. The main document of references I maintain on playing cards is over 150 pages long, currently. The associated files not contained in the document account for a little over 6GB. It's gotten to the point that I take pictures of items with my phone and upload them rather than trying to keep physical copies. And thanks to free scanning applications I can even translate pictures of text to text. Image viewer doesn't allow me to download a zoomed view of a medieval document? Alt+Printscreen, GIMP crop, and voila. God but I do love this modern age!
Of course, it's not all sunshine. But the clouds are mostly of my own making. When I started this (combs, I'm looking at you) I just grabbed the photo and moved on. And a couple of weeks later when I wanted to go back and do more research I had failed to note where the picture had come from and it took me a while to find it again. If I could. Yep, some pictures I've never found again. Even using the Google photo search capabilities.
So now I get the picture (really, just drag it from the screen to the Google Doc), I get the URL of the picture and put it beneath the picture, I get the URL of the page the picture appears on, and then I grab descriptive text from the page and/or add my own notes. In effect, building my own annotated reference bibliography. If the file is a PDF then I grab the info regarding that file in the same fashion and download the PDF file to Google Docs and then I add a link to my copy of the file. Voila.
Finding the information on the internet has been... interesting. There is a lot of information to find. If you aren't a member at your local museum, become one. Or join a museum you like. Because museums are digitizing their collections and making them available online and it's amazing what you can find if you're patient enough.
I separate internet searches into two levels: surface and sub-surface. Surface searches are actually enormous in scope; they are everything you can find in a Google search. The sub-surface searches are the databases accessible through the internet but not through Google itself. I usually use Google to locate these sources and then go to them and see what they hold.
Surface searches. There's a vast amount of information to be found on the web. Google will help you find it. The first thing you need to do is figure out what you're looking for. While this sounds simple, it's not always the case. The best information is frequently found in professional sources and professions sometimes have different names for things. Compile a list of your search terms and start looking. Try mixing them up. Now do the same thing in different languages. If you're researching playing cards you're going to need to use German search terms to find a lot of the best information, for example. Google Translate is your friend in finding these search terms and in getting the gist of what the foreign language documents are saying. BUT, you need to look at the foreign language documents in their original language to find more search terms.
A good way to find information rich sources is to limit the filetypes you are searching. Google will allow you to specify. My favorite document type is a PDF. This file format is the favorite of museums and researchers and document digitizers. That makes it particularly likely to contain high-quality information. I simply end any Google search with filetype:PDF and it will show me only PDF files.
Another way to quickly assess the results of a search, particularly for a foreign language, is to use the image search in Google. While it can be hard to determine if a Greek document is worth looking at on the basis of the Greek text description returned by a typical Google search, if I see an image the site contains that has, for instance, a comb, then I know I've found something worth looking at. You can also right click on a photo and have it search for other instances of the same photo (great for finding other pages that you're looking for) and visually similar images (not usually a winner but sometimes you hit the jackpot).
This process is easy to get lost in so it's good to take notes along the way. Remember what search terms you're currently using (write them down). Take notes of search terms you want to use: words, phrases, books, other references.
When you find a site that looks like it has multiple references, mine it. Google will allow you to search a specific website. Site:www.example,com will search only that site for your search terms. Sometimes you aren't meant to see other web pages within a site. You can sometimes circumvent this. Try removing the name of the webpage from the website URL and see if you get access to the info within. Example: www.example.com/motherlode/example.html becomes www.example.com/motherlode/ Fewer and fewer web administrators make this mistake, but sometimes they do. Is this hacking? Not according to the legal opinion I sought out a couple decades ago. Honestly, this technique is mostly useless these days as the Google web-crawlers tend to find these resources. But sometimes you turn over a rock and find cool stuff.
Sub-surface searches are more likely to be information rich but they can be difficult to locate sources and harder still to get access. WorldCat is a good example of a readily available database. Google does not index WorldCat so while you can find it with Google, you can't search it. WorldCat is a worldwide catalog connected to hundreds of libraries worldwide. You can use it to search in much the same way you search Google. It not only references books it references articles and online resources. It's also a great resource for Inter-Library Loans. My two library accounts allow me to sign in to World Cat from the library website and make an ILL request directly from WorldCat. My library memberships also grant me access to different databases referenced by WorldCat. A university membership might come with access to different academic databases, for instance. You'd be surprised at the places you can get membership. A one year reader's card for the Oxford Library System (hello Bodleian!) is 40 Pounds.
Museum and University sources are also great sub-surface sources to search. Many European institutions, including libraries, are digitizing their holdings. The Denver Public Library has a large database of photographs from the late 19th Century American West, for instance. I like to identify institutions that hold resources I want to examine, based on my previous searches, and then go to those sites and see if I can search them. Frequently they are free. More frequently you can get access for a small fee, particularly the European institutes. Sometimes you just need to access the database from the right source (hint: institutions which offer free access, usually European, or institutions at which you have a membership).
The databases are information rich but sometimes very difficult to search. Google Translate is your friend in finding the database, but once you're in you're generally going to have to navigate in the language of the database. Translate will help you still by allowing you to translate individual terms. It helps to think of it as an adventure. Remember that bibliographies are a great comfort in times of search. And try to come at problems from a different angle. I have found, for instance, several books that were rather expensive available for download free of charge. Why? Because they were the Master's or Doctoral theses of the authors and were published by their Universities.
Be creative, be persistent, and have fun. And that's all I've got to say about that at the moment.
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