I have another old deck I am wondering about. (I work at a small museum where we are cataloging some old games and toys in our collection.) Could anyone tell me anything about these cards? Thank you!
Looks like it's a "skat" deck - a special deck of playing cards intended for playing a specific card game called "skat." It's a lot like a pinochle deck, but way fewer cards. I think skat decks had 32 cards - the low spot cards weren't used, so special decks made just for skat didn't include them - it made the deck less expensive.
Playing cards didn't become common household commodities until around the late 19th or early 20th century because of the cost of manufacture. You watch old Westerns with people playing cards around the tables of a saloon - often, it was the saloon that owned the decks, not the players, and they'd get stored nightly in a deck vise to keep them flat and ready for use the next day.
I agree that this particular deck was very possibly French in origin, at least in terms of the original design. It's also possible that some Eastern European deck maker may have copied the French designs to make their own cards - that, too, was a common practice in the mid-to-late 19th century. "American" playing cards originated in Rouen, where cards for export were made and sold (the French considered the Parisian deck designs to be theirs, the Rouen cards to be inferior works). From there, the British bought them, then copied the designs, and the Americans did the same to the Brits. As a result, the International Standard came about by way of Rouen.
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