I have two playing-card-related research projects currently under way. Wellll..... I say research. I really mean Indiana Jones style searches for lost artifacts. A research project is making different kinds of inks; I'm searching for playing cards that haven't been seen in decades.
The first project is a search for the Krech Playing Cards. This partial deck is comprised of two, uncut but damaged, sheets of woodcut cards in a German style. A note written on one of the sheets estimates the cards are from 1440. Literally, it says "CA 1440" in a modern hand. These cards were in the collection of Mr. Alvin William Krech sometime before 1934. To the best of my knowledge these cards have not been seen by the general public since.
If you read my blog you know these cards. Jorge Kelman made an astounding reproduction deck based on these cards. You can tell I really like these cards and his work. Which is part of the reason I set out to find them.
Mr. Alvin W. Krech was a railroad man and a banker in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He was interested in the history of printing and was, at the time, a noted collector of early printed books. Books printed before the advent of movable-type are called incunabula. He had a number of these and, apparently, these two sheets of cards. He died in 1928 and, so far as I can tell, the collection was distributed to several members of his family.
The family began liquidating his collection in 1936 with the sale of two leaves of a Catholicon he owned. Some of the incunabula seem to have been sold off in 1948 but the playing cards were apparently not sold at that time. In 1969 Mr. Shepard Krech died and the last remaining portion of the collection I've been able to locate, an unknown number of books illustrated by George Cruikshank, apparently went to Yale University as a bequest or as a purchase.
I have been running down leads on these cards and have found a number of places the cards might have gone to. My job has mostly been to eliminate these leads. Believe it or not, finding the cards have not been sold at auction is actually a good thing. If the cards had sold at auction it would be very difficult to determine who bought the cards. As it stands, every lead I eliminate increases the odds that the cards are still with the family. That said, I don't think the family has the cards anymore. I've been in touch with them and they're going to look around, but I think the cards were either sold or donated or, God forbid, lost.
The second search should be a lot easier. The Mamluk Playing Cards in the holdings of the Topkapi Museum were last documented around 1972 when Cartamundi published a re-creation of the deck. I have been trying to determine the location and condition of these cards, and possibly obtain some new photos of them. Despite the fact that these cards are located in a world famous museum they are actually proving more difficult to locate. The Topkapi Sayrai Museum is actually three museums and all three are controlled by government agencies. Sort of like the Library of Congress in the United States. Sort of. The cards don't appear in the online catalog (I think. I don't claim any skill at all with Turkish) and haven't been on display in the past five years, that I have been able to determine. That means I can't refer to the cards by a catalog number.
Worse, without establishing researcher credentials with the appropriate government agency the folks at the Topkapi won't talk to me. So I've got no way to determine if the cards even exist at the moment. Right now my challenge is to get someone at the Topkapi to talk to me. Numerous attempts to contact people by e-mail have failed. I'm in receipt of the standard form they send out to people to establish research credentials but that form is skewed towards archaeology and they assume you will be visiting the country in person so they want passport information. I haven't had a passport in years. So I'm getting one so I can fill out a form so someone will, hopefully, talk to me about the world famous playing cards that don't appear in the museum's catalog and aren't on display.
Sigh.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Ink
What's the difference between ink and paint? I still can't give you a good definition. The oil-based inks I use for block-printing don't seem all that much different from the oil-based paints I used when I was a child. I'm pretty sure there's a formal definition but I haven't looked it up yet. I probably should. Because when it comes to playing cards I suspect it's going to be significant. In my mind it's largely about the thickness of the media.
Remember how I said this wasn't a reference heavy blog? Keep that in mind.
I've been researching pigments used to produce playing cards. These run the gamut of medieval resources. You can find playing cards that are miniature (or not so miniature, Stuttgart Cards I'm looking at you) paintings. Multiple layers of paper glued together, a gesso prep layer (burnished even), ink, paint, gold leaf, silver leaf and the whole shebang. The Cloister's Cards are another good example of this. The earliest references to card makers are people who were also painters.
At the other end of the scale you can find the mass-produced two and three color cards that came out of the French, German, and Italian factories to supply the domestic and foreign markets. These could be fairly crude affairs and might even have been painted by finger (yeah, I mean finger-painted). These used, at most, five colors and were very definitely not hand painted works of art. When these were not hand-painted (or finger-painted) the ink seems to have typically been applied using stencils rather than multiple blocks. I've found a couple of references to stencil use in the 14th Century and a lead(!) stencil for a rosette from the same time period (holdings of the British Museum). But the first reference to using stencils for making cards is in a census from a town in mid-15th Century Germany.
Inks! I was talking about inks! The National Gallery of Art performed an analysis of the pigments used to color the medieval (15th Century) woodcuts in their collection. Here's a link to a summary.
http://artinprint.org/article/coloring-within-the-lines-the-use-of-stencil-in-early-woodcuts/
Here's a quote from that summary:
Which brings up another good point. Saying I've been researching inks used on playing cards is like saying I've been researching medieval books. When? Where? Ultimately general knowledge needs to be applied to specific cases and that's not always possible. In decks where only the black and white remnants survive it can be impossible to know what colors should be used to recreate that deck. Part of me thinks that's tragic and part of me says 'Oh, well.'
Some random stuff:
-Ink is made in the same way as paint except the binder is typically gum arabic rather than egg-white or egg-yolk. In general. You mix a powder that can be derived from organic (brazilwood, berries, saffron, etc...) or inorganic (clay, copper sulfate, copper acetate, lead carbonate, etc...) sources with water and use gum arabic (dried acacia tree sap) as the binder. Other things can be added to change the color, alter the consistency of the paint, prevent it from spoiling and etc..
-Gutenberg's many contributions to the art of printing included creating a reliable oil-based ink.
-Inks sometimes included an acidic component that helped bring out color and helped the ink sink into the fibers of the paper. That acid could also contribute to destroying the paper over time.
Edit to add some links:
http://www.jcsparks.com/painted/recipes.html
Came across a reference to 18th Century inks for playing cards in Hungary being made with soot (lampblack) and starch glue (wheat paste), in the case of black, and pigments ground with flour in the case of colors. It was a little unclear to me how the non-black colors were done. It would seem to make sense to use the same process for black as for the other colors, just change the pigments used. But the language seems to indicate a difference in the process. Perhaps the black pigment was added to the starch glue rather than being added in as part of the glue-making process?
Remember how I said this wasn't a reference heavy blog? Keep that in mind.
I've been researching pigments used to produce playing cards. These run the gamut of medieval resources. You can find playing cards that are miniature (or not so miniature, Stuttgart Cards I'm looking at you) paintings. Multiple layers of paper glued together, a gesso prep layer (burnished even), ink, paint, gold leaf, silver leaf and the whole shebang. The Cloister's Cards are another good example of this. The earliest references to card makers are people who were also painters.
At the other end of the scale you can find the mass-produced two and three color cards that came out of the French, German, and Italian factories to supply the domestic and foreign markets. These could be fairly crude affairs and might even have been painted by finger (yeah, I mean finger-painted). These used, at most, five colors and were very definitely not hand painted works of art. When these were not hand-painted (or finger-painted) the ink seems to have typically been applied using stencils rather than multiple blocks. I've found a couple of references to stencil use in the 14th Century and a lead(!) stencil for a rosette from the same time period (holdings of the British Museum). But the first reference to using stencils for making cards is in a census from a town in mid-15th Century Germany.
Inks! I was talking about inks! The National Gallery of Art performed an analysis of the pigments used to color the medieval (15th Century) woodcuts in their collection. Here's a link to a summary.
http://artinprint.org/article/coloring-within-the-lines-the-use-of-stencil-in-early-woodcuts/
Here's a quote from that summary:
Scientific analysis of the paints used on early woodcuts indicates that colorists favored inexpensive, water-based paints in a limited palette that included both mineral and organic or dye-based pigments. Typical colors include green (copper-based), orange (lead-based), red (possibly brazilwood- or madder-dye-based), blue (possibly indigo- or woad-dye-based) and yellow (possibly buckthorn-, saffron- or weld-dye-based). Various tones of purple were created using a mixture of red and blue, and a dye-based green paint could be made with a mixture of yellow and blue. Paints on many stencil-colored prints have a smooth, matte appearance because colorists learned to modify their paints by adding chalk (calcium carbonate) to the mixtures, formulating viscous paints that could be applied in even layers that would dry faster and would not bleed beyond the outline of the stencil.Awesome stuff, right? Tons more information in there and, as always, check the bibliography, kids. I was feeling rather chuffed that I'd guessed the composition of a lot of the inks based on how they had aged and how they interacted with the black ink on the cards. The quote above lists red as being an organic-derived ink, but later in the article they show another red-orange that is lead-based. I can find examples of both kinds of red being used on playing cards.
Which brings up another good point. Saying I've been researching inks used on playing cards is like saying I've been researching medieval books. When? Where? Ultimately general knowledge needs to be applied to specific cases and that's not always possible. In decks where only the black and white remnants survive it can be impossible to know what colors should be used to recreate that deck. Part of me thinks that's tragic and part of me says 'Oh, well.'
Some random stuff:
-Ink is made in the same way as paint except the binder is typically gum arabic rather than egg-white or egg-yolk. In general. You mix a powder that can be derived from organic (brazilwood, berries, saffron, etc...) or inorganic (clay, copper sulfate, copper acetate, lead carbonate, etc...) sources with water and use gum arabic (dried acacia tree sap) as the binder. Other things can be added to change the color, alter the consistency of the paint, prevent it from spoiling and etc..
-Gutenberg's many contributions to the art of printing included creating a reliable oil-based ink.
-Inks sometimes included an acidic component that helped bring out color and helped the ink sink into the fibers of the paper. That acid could also contribute to destroying the paper over time.
Edit to add some links:
http://www.jcsparks.com/painted/recipes.html
Came across a reference to 18th Century inks for playing cards in Hungary being made with soot (lampblack) and starch glue (wheat paste), in the case of black, and pigments ground with flour in the case of colors. It was a little unclear to me how the non-black colors were done. It would seem to make sense to use the same process for black as for the other colors, just change the pigments used. But the language seems to indicate a difference in the process. Perhaps the black pigment was added to the starch glue rather than being added in as part of the glue-making process?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)