Topkapi/Mamluk Cards

[variantventures]

I found a company in Japan that's selling the Aurelia Books/Cartamundi cards.  But at $170 a deck plus shipping, that's a little rich for my blood.  So I've been working on making my own.  It's been a process and it's far from complete.  I have most of the detail elements ready to go and was working on the layouts. I liked the layouts so much that I went ahead and printed a deck for my own use.

[Don Boyer]

Please be more careful when choosing the board on which to create a topic - this is obviously a new deck and you posted the topic in A Cellar of Fine Vintages, the board for vintage and antique decks.  (C)2013 is NOT vintage by any stretch of the imagination... 

[variantventures]

I was actually hoping to discuss the original decks and the Aurelia Books/Carta Mundi prints.  But the post was badly written.  My apologies and thanks for the move to the correct forum.


So I found my link to the Japanese company selling re-prints.  They are at: http://pentacle.jp/?pid=4957717  These cards were printed in 1972 (I think it was '72, might have been a couple years later, definitely the 70's) and they made something like 800 of these.  I think I've found a German company selling them but I'm not sure.  http://www.spielkartenladen.de (I couldn't load the site yesterday for some reason and they're blocked at the office.)

I've been fascinated with these cards for a while.  They use a court system which doesn't depict human figures, which is in keeping with the Sunni prohibition on such, and they contain Arabic phrases that may be related to cartomancy.  The court system has disappeared from modern use.  The faces of the cards are incredible, each one a work of art.  Yet the backs are plain because they couldn't make uniform designs or even uniform solid coats of paint.  And while the Topkapi/Mamluk cards date to the 15th-16th Centuries, there is a playing card fragment held in Berlin which dates to the 12th-13th Centuries.  The De Unger fragment is 1/2 or 1/4 of a playing card and it is very much the same design as the Topkapi/Mamluk cards (though in much worse shape).  But if the De Unger fragment is correctly dated (I have my doubts) that would make it the earliest known direct ancestor of modern playing cards.

I've been looking for really good photographs of the original cards so I can get the color palette right.  If anyone has any suggestions for sources I'd appreciate it.

[Don Boyer]

My first bet would be to find a seller and ask for some images of the cards.  They'll usually accommodate a potential customer.

After that, consider that you need not necessarily follow the original color patterns to the letter.  Think of your market: are you selling to people who can read Arabic and understands the suits?  If not, coloring the suits in different colors might be a good idea.  If you're trying to make a deck that's useable in games normally played with an International-style deck, you could pick shades of two colors and use a shade for each suit.  For example, deep blue, light blue, deep red and reddish-pink.

I scoured the German site, but no Mamluk cards.  The Japanese site, on the other hand...

The cards look VERY elaborate.  Was it hand-painted?

[variantventures]

Yes, the cards were hand-painted, and metallic foil was used as well.  This is apparently the case for most/all playing cards pre-1360.  They were also huge, the original cards were almost 8in high.  Again this seems to be the case for early playing cards; we can see illustrations of early playing cards in Europe that are very large.  It's only after block-printing on paper becomes standard that we see cards shrinking to sizes we would consider normal.

My designs are an intermediate step.  I laid out the designs to make sure I had all my proportions correct and to see if the designs filled the space properly.  The next step is to refine these layouts a little and start adding color and detail.  I printed a copy of the layouts for myself because I liked the stark contrast of the black and white and the simplicity.

I've got a friend who travels in the area who has promised to visit the Topkapi and take whatever pictures he can when he next visits.  Other than that I'm relying on images other people have taken and there is a wide variety of color shades given the vagaries of light conditions.  It can also be difficult to determine if you're looking at an original card or a Carta Mundi reproduction.

My market is fairly tiny.  I'm mostly doing these for myself but I might be able to sell a few, reduced in size to fit on a tarot-size deck, to a couple of people.  Another friend, who lives in Egypt, says he'll sound out a few of his acquaintances to see if there's any interest in what is a uniquely Middle-Eastern design but neither of us thinks there will be.

[Don Boyer]

Yes, the cards were hand-painted, and metallic foil was used as well.  This is apparently the case for most/all playing cards pre-1360.  They were also huge, the original cards were almost 8in high.  Again this seems to be the case for early playing cards; we can see illustrations of early playing cards in Europe that are very large.  It's only after block-printing on paper becomes standard that we see cards shrinking to sizes we would consider normal.

My designs are an intermediate step.  I laid out the designs to make sure I had all my proportions correct and to see if the designs filled the space properly.  The next step is to refine these layouts a little and start adding color and detail.  I printed a copy of the layouts for myself because I liked the stark contrast of the black and white and the simplicity.

I've got a friend who travels in the area who has promised to visit the Topkapi and take whatever pictures he can when he next visits.  Other than that I'm relying on images other people have taken and there is a wide variety of color shades given the vagaries of light conditions.  It can also be difficult to determine if you're looking at an original card or a Carta Mundi reproduction.

My market is fairly tiny.  I'm mostly doing these for myself but I might be able to sell a few, reduced in size to fit on a tarot-size deck, to a couple of people.  Another friend, who lives in Egypt, says he'll sound out a few of his acquaintances to see if there's any interest in what is a uniquely Middle-Eastern design but neither of us thinks there will be.

There is another possibility.  You can recreate the designs for a very faithful reproduction as a Tarot-sized deck, but you could also make the long images as the center of a poker-sized card, with International pips and values correlating to each card, making them as playable as any modern deck.  Does the original have 52 cards?  Fewer?  More?

If done in this manner, you might find a larger audience.

[variantventures]

Very interesting idea.  There's certainly room for the French pips on the sides and with print on demand I can do the cards with or without as the customer prefers.  I'll see how that works.  Thank you.

[variantventures]

And I found an e-bay sale, long since completed, which details the 1977 reprint of the cards.  Apparently Carta Mundi had left over supplies after the 1972 print run of the reproductions and rather than discarding them they used them up in a small print run of approximately 250 decks.  These are numbered 1-~250 with the prefix B.

I was also, courtesy of some of the images posted, able to confirm that Carta Mundi created a decorated back for the cards (which I feel is rather stylistically weak) and they printed the deck with the erroneous 'assistant' cards.

[variantventures]

I got my test decks back from the printer earlier this week.  The Topkapi/Mamluk deck came out very nice.  I can think of about three changes I would make but those are going to have to wait for the full color cards.  Sorry for the orientation.  Here are the deck, displaying the Islamic geometric pattern I elected to use rather than just leaving the backs blank, and the courts and tens of cups and polo-sticks/staves.

The additional white-space is a conscious design compromise.  Rather than changing the proportions of the original cards to fit the modern tarot-size decks, I kept the proportions and left the white space.  There are people out there who will trim the excess white space off to get a perfectly rectangular card that looks more like the originals.  For marketing these in the Middle East I'm looking at filling the exterior white space and adding numbers/designators to the top left corner.  Again, something that will wait for the full color and detailed version of the deck.

I'm pretty happy with these and look forward to using them.

[Don Boyer]

The design appears to be coming along very nicely.  You shouldn't limit yourself to sales just in the Middle East - our country has many Muslims who might find a deck like this very welcome.

[variantventures]

Honestly I don't think I'm going to sell a lot of these period.  And I think I'll sell less in the Middle East than I will in the US and Europe.  For many Muslims, playing cards seems to be a conscious or unconscious rebellion against some of the more chafing aspects of their native countries/cultures.  They seem to  prefer European or American cards precisely because those designs aren't a part of their culture.

Still, we'll see.  With print on demand I can make many variations of a design available to customers without having to fund a large minimum order print run.  At the cost of sacrificing some quality and having to charge customers more per deck, of course.