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.

Card Making

Blueprints (1)

Woodblock Playing Cards