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A Cellar of Fine Vintages / Re: Ask the Experts at 52 Plus Joker
« Last post by Don Boyer on April 06, 2024, 06:23:20 AM »Bicycle card question...
There are hundreds of Bicycle back designs (if not more) but reference material seems to be almost universally limited to 82 vintage backs. I know there are vintage decks and modern decks but today's modern is tomorrow's vintage. What's defining that specific cutoff point?
Sorry this went so long unanswered.
This book is the main reason:
https://bicyclecards.org/mrs-robinsons/
It was printed in the 1950s and listed all the Bicycle backs that were known by the author to exist at the time. For a long time, that was it, just those backs - I guess USPC didn't take on a lot of custom work in the pre-digital age unless you ran a casino and were planning to buy tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of decks. Making a new deck design involved a lot of hard labor in the pre-digital days using engraved plates and other such fun, laborious methods to print. It's not that long ago that people didn't have computers for design and print work and to make the plates for an offset printer.
You are correct in that today's new decks are tomorrow's vintage decks, and to go a step further, today's vintage decks are tomorrow's antique decks - and we don't have a category beyond antique! A rough ballpark figure is that decks past 20 years old are vintage, decks past 100 years old are antique.
Now, there seems to be an implied question in there: where can I find the catalog that lists all of the Bicycle card backs from that booklet to today. And you won't like the answer: there isn't one. USPC over the years changed hands at least a half-dozen or more times, and with each change, there was a lot of upheaval in terms of taking care of what was valuable in the short term (decks printed in that moment) and not what isn't actively generating income (archives, old records, etc.). So the records at USPC are likely not complete, and probably not well organized at this point, with much it still being stored analog, not digital. They can certainly find a lot of stuff, but they would be very hard pressed to create a record of every single Bicycle back design and face design printed and used from the dawn of the brand to today - it's well over 130 years of info by now.