Only 1000 produced. Let the scrambling begin!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2016/03/04/facebook_b2b_playing_cards_designed_by_human_after_all_are_a_bespoke_deck.html

Hi, everyone, first-time poster.

I'm not a collector, at least not of vintage decks, but I think I might have Done Good.

Now, I like to thrift for boardgames, as the current boardgame renaissance has mostly passed by the kinds of games I like (abstract strategy and classic card games).But  I nearly always skip over the playing cards, since I've certainly got plenty already, and they're cheap enough that second-hand doesn't really make sense. But for some reason (maybe it was the larger than usual number of decks), I decided to paw through them today. There ended up being quite a load of Bicycles, though not rider backs.

I've handled enough decks (having gone through my magic phase) to know that these were old, no coating on the box, just plain paper, and some sort of tax stamp, etc.. At $.49 a deck, I figured it was worth speculating a bit. So I picked up a couple of the ones in the best shape. Wasn't till I got in my car that I made out the cancel in black on the stamps: 4-1-19. At that point, I went back into the shop and picked up anything that looked remotely old. They vary from well-played but still snappy, to still-in-the-original-wax-paper. Boxes range from "pretty chewy" to "mint, but for the glue that didn't last 100 years".

My haul:
bikes (all with at least portions of the stamp dating to no later than 1924, most with that 4-1-19 cancel visible)::
5 expert backs
2 tangent backs
1 wheel back
1 new fan back

others:
1 rexall drug (same stamp as the bikes)
1 uncle sam (only deck not to have a stamp, appears later, as flap states 1942)
1 arrco canasta (later as well, card in shrink, having the 1940-1965 stamp)

I can post pics if anyone is interested. Interestingly, none of the bicycles seem to line up with the alphabetic dating system found on cypressfilms.com. The main "collection" (i.e., not the Uncle Sam and Canasta decks) seem to have had an interesting legacy. Clearly someone was enough of an avid card player to buy up 10 decks, but somehow only through a couple, leaving most of them close to intact for 100 years.