19th Century Pack of Playing Cards, by De La Rue

Here is a historic 32-card deck of cards, made by De La Rue & Co, of London. For those that are not familiar with the history of playing cards, I should at least mention that De La Rue was an important maker from the 19th century, not so much because they were one of the biggest makers of playing cards, but because they were the first to introduce Pneumatic Playing Cards, an invention that has been adopted by all other makers of playing cards and is not better known under the terms air cushion finish, or cambric finish, or linen finish, depending on how each brand decides to call it. In a nutshell, smooth finish playing cards tend to stick together, which makes it difficult to shuffle the deck. But this post is not about De La Rue's Pneumatic Playing Cards, it's about this deck, that's around 140 years old and appears to be in mint condition. A rare find. How these cards have remained in such stunning condition, with no box or wrapper of any kind, is a mystery.


This pack was made between 1870 and 1877; we can tell this because the pips on the numerical cards are all pointing one way and the suit symbols on six of the court cards are still on the right side. The ace of spades says, "Duty Three Pence - when used in Great Britain and Ireland." The backs are an intricate basket weave pattern.

One detail that's interesting about this deck is that, for whatever reason, all the court cards are slightly longer than the rest of the deck. In the image below all the cards are in numerical order and squared up against the table.


The next photo is even more interesting. If you shuffle the pack overhand style and if you hold the cards softly, you will notice that the longer cards can easily be stripped out of the deck. In the photo the cards are still in numerical order, so the stripped cards appear in four groups of three.


I can't really say that the discrepancy in the length of the cards is deliberate. It's probably just the way the cards were cut, because the court cards were probably produced separately. It's also possible that the numerical cards were trimmed by some cheat, or would be cheat, a century ago. This might help explain why the cards are in mint condition. If the trimming was done as an attempt to make a stripper deck (which obviously worked) and if the person that trimmed the cards never actually used this particular deck it could have ended up in the back of a drawer, only to be discovered a few decades later, when those kinds of cards were no longer commonly used. But that's all speculation.

I am not really sure what game this deck was made for. Bezique was a popular game at that time, played with two 32-card packs shuffle together, thus making a pack of 64 cards. So, this is quite possibly a bezique pack.