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.