Woodblock Playing Cards

Lay out a grid of card outlines on paper — nine or twelve cards to a sheet, each 60 x 90 mm with 6 mm gaps. Early cards were printed many to a sheet and cut apart afterwards, purely for economy.

Sand a basswood or lino block dead flat and check it against a straightedge. Any dip prints as a pale patch, and you cannot press it out later.

Draw the design on thin paper, lay it face down on the block and rub it off, or trace it through carbon paper mirrored. Any text or number must be cut backwards or it prints backwards.

Go over the transferred lines with black ink so you can see what to keep. On the block, black is what survives; everything unmarked is waste.

Cut a shallow V groove just outside every line you want to print, working around the line rather than into it. This isolates the printing lines before you clear anything.

Scoop out the large blank areas 2-3 mm deep with a U gouge. Shallow clearing picks up ink at the edges and prints grey smudges in the whites.

Keep the non-cutting hand behind the tool and clamp the block down. A gouge that slips travels the full length of the stroke.

Ink the block and print one sheet on scrap. Broken lines, grey patches and missed clearings show up here and nowhere else. Recut and proof again.

Roll the ink out on a slab until it hisses, then charge the block in two directions. Thick ink fills the fine lines and turns the outline into a blob.

Lay the pasteboard on the inked block, hold it still, and burnish the back firmly with a spoon or baren, working in overlapping circles. Lift one corner to check before pulling the sheet.

Interleave the printed sheets with clean paper and dry them under light weight, 24 hours for oil-based ink.

Cut a stencil for each colour from oiled card or thin sheet, one colour at a time, using a printed sheet as the pattern. From about 1450 this is how woodcuts of every kind were coloured.

Cut two notches in every stencil that line up with the same two marks printed on the sheet. Without registration marks each colour lands slightly off and the deck looks drunk.

Hold the stencil down flat and work colour through it with a stiff, nearly dry brush, sweeping across the openings. A wet brush creeps under the edge and blurs the shape.

Cut the sheet down the gaps with a straightedge and knife. Cut the long axis first on every sheet so any drift stays consistent across the deck.

Burnish each card and rub a trace of beeswax over the face. Slick cards slide against each other; unwaxed pasteboard drags and will not shuffle.

Cards arrive, then printing arrives. Playing cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century. Hand-painted decks survive from the fifteenth century as luxury objects, but no printed cards are known from before the 1420s. From roughly 1418 to 1450 professional card makers working in Ulm, Nuremberg and Augsburg were producing printed decks, and cards rivalled devotional prints as the most common product of the early woodcut.

Block, then engraving, then stencil. The images were drawn by hand, cut in relief on woodblocks, or — for the finest work — printed from copper engravings. Colour was applied by hand at first and by stencil from about 1450 onward. Each of those steps cut the labour per deck, and each one widened the market.

Pasteboard underneath. The stock was laminated pasteboard of three to six sheets. Stiffness let a card be dealt and shuffled; opacity stopped it being read from the back. The material is a blueprint in its own right and predates printing on it by a long way.

What we do not know. Surviving early decks are fragmentary — many known only from uncut proof sheets and from cards recycled as binding waste inside book covers, which is where a great deal of early printing survives at all. The suit systems now called German, Latin and French took shape over the fifteenth century, with the French pattern of hearts, tiles, clovers and pikes appearing around 1480 and winning out largely because its flat single-colour shapes could be stencilled in a couple of strokes. The design that survived was the one that was cheapest to colour.

Diderot, and a caution. Much of the detailed technical description of card making that gets quoted for the medieval period actually comes from Diderot's Encyclopédie in the eighteenth century. It describes a mature trade three centuries later than the first printed cards, and should not be read back onto them as if it were contemporary evidence.