34: MIXED PACKS

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A FEW ADDITIONS HAVE BEEN MADE.

A number of mixed packs appear for sale from time to time, but it's important to sort out what is meant by the term mixed.   It is an issue that is not as straightforward as it might seem.   First of all we should distinguish between what might be termed in-house mixing, where a maker has published a pack with cards of different styles (a consistent back design would be a clue in such cases) and those cases where some outside hand has interfered in some way with the make-up of the pack, usually for illegitimate purposes.   Cards with no back design help the perpetrator with the latter kind of mixing.

Let's start with two examples of the former kind of mixing.   When a maker had more than one style of court card or pip shape, it was always possible that packs put together by hand, as was normal up into the 1870s, could end up with different styles in one pack.   Hardy produced an unusual design of court card in the 1830s (see page 32), but there's a pack with the QS & JS of his normal Type I courts.

Hardy, c.1830

Later, when there are consistent back designs to help us, we find different types of pip design in Goodall's packs.

Similarly with De La Rue's packs, where different styles of court card appear in the same pack:

De La Rue D5 queens (unturned) and D6 kings and jacks (turned), c.1875

And much later, in the 1940s, Waddington issued a pack with mixed W5.1 and W5.5 courts with a redrawn QD.   I have no idea how this would come about with mechanical sorting!

Waddington W5.1 KH, W5.5 QC and QD with redrawn face, c.1947

Personally, I love this kind of oddity!

There is another in-house kind of mixing that is found in wood-block cards.   It was customary in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to produce ten courts on one block and the two red jacks (x 5) on another, which meant that in some packs the red jacks don't match the other courts, if a maker used more than one type of court.   There are a number of examples on recent pages:  the Creswick packs on page 32 and the first Hall pack on page 31 (Type II with Type I red jacks).   This practice finished with the modernizing makers such as De La Rue and Goodall, who printed all the courts together.

The other kind of mixing, by outside interference, is more difficult to determine, though there are some clues.   Some packs have been mixed up from use, careless handling (such as putting together different packs without regard to the backs or even front design when re-sorting two or more packs) and recent attempts to make up complete packs, sometimes even for purposes of deception.   The clue here is either an obvious mismatch of makers, e.g. Goodall & Bancks cards in the same pack, or uneven wear throughout the pack, i.e. varying degrees of cleanness.   On the other hand, there are two other possibilities:  second-hand packs and packs released illegally.   The first of these was regulated by taxation rules and such packs were supposed to be tax-wrapped and marked as second-hand.   (See page 13 for a late 19th century example of imported second-hand cards from America.)   It is fairly certain that dealers in second-hand cards did not always abide by the legal requirements.   In the days of plain backs packs of this kind were typically made up of cards by different makers, but the wear is consistent, which tells us that the mixing happened a long time ago.   Such a pack was recently offered on eBay:  it had a James Hardy Exportation Garter AS with four genuine Hardy courts, four Type I Hunt courts and four Hunt HB1 courts.   The number cards were not consistent, either, but the wear was.   This suggests that it was a made-up, second-hand pack of the 1820s (the earliest date for the introduction of HB1 courts).   It is likely to be an illegal pack, as Exportation ASs were not to be used for the home market.   Other packs, which are consistent except for the AS, are also likely to have been illegally sold in this country, especially if the ace is an export one.   The packs below share a lot of their court cards (i.e. they are from the same blocks), which are typical of those made by Hall.   Indeed, the bottom pack has a Hall Garter AS, but the top one has a Hunt & Son, successors to Gibson, Exportation ace and the middle one a Wheeler's Ludlow ace.

There must have been some kind of illegal trade in duty aces, whether they were sold to others without permission, as waste-paper or as bankrupt stock.   Hart duty aces, for example, appear in all kinds of packs:  the following one has Hall courts and the lower one looks American in style.   The aces are genuine, the packs are illegal.

From plainbacks, A2

From plainbacks, A28

Plainbacks A16 also looks American and may have a forged AS.   Note that none of the packs I have discussed above should be termed fakes or forgeries:  they have been put together from perfectly genuine cards, even if they were sometimes sold illegally.   Forgery is something different.   In this case either the AS is forged to avoid paying the tax, as in the case of Harding, or the whole pack is made by someone else and purports to be by a legitimate maker, as in the case of the Belgian fake illustrated on page 18, again with the intention of defrauding the taxman.

What to do when offered a mixed pack?   That's up to the purchaser.   If one wants an example of an evenly worn, second-hand pack of the early 19th century, then look for the signs that what you are being offered is such a pack.   If you're offered a mixture of clean and dirty cards, even by what appears to be the same maker, take extra care in making your decision.

Here are two more examples of mixed packs, which give an idea of what to look out for.

This is pack B21 from plainbacks.   The QS is not by Wheeler, but by Hardy.   There are good reasons for claiming this, though there is no room here to go into the details, but both the cut of the block and the colour distribution are those of Hardy.   For example, the blue under the sceptre is typical of Hardy, whereas Wheeler does not use this colour here, and Wheeler colours the arm blue and red, rather than all blue.   On the other hand, the red jacks are by Wheeler, even though they have a different eye type (II rather than I, as on the other courts).   This is an example of the in-house mixing that I referred to above, and is found in other Wheeler packs.

These courts are from F25 on plainbacks, a pack with an Old Frizzle AS by Creswick.   All the courts are by Creswick except for the KD:  this is from a Hunt HB1 pack.   It is difficult to tell from a scan, but the paper looks lighter than on the other courts.

Three recent acquisitions give more evidence of the kind of mixing that one can find.   The first is a Hunt pack of c.1813-15 which has at least three cards that are in some way unexpected.   The 2S & 3S have a pip shape that is different from the other spades (see the 4S);  they are found in later packs by Hunt with HB1 courts, but still a Garter AS.   The other odd card, the KD, is much more difficult to explain, as it's by Hall (with Type II eyes, rather than Hunt's Type I), of about the same date.   The reason these cards can't be just labeled 'secondhand' is that all the cards have gold edges.   Since this must have been a relatively expensive process, it's unlikely to have been applied to second-hand cards, which were usually sold for just a few pence.   So, how does a Hall KD get into a Hunt pack?   Well, they were close neighbours in Piccadilly at this time, and later, in 1840, amalgamated.   So it could be that they helped each other out sometimes with stocks of cards that were low or had run out, but I expect we'll never know the exact details of their relationship before the amalgamation.

Hunt, c.1810, gold edges

The second pack is much more recent, from the early days of the canasta boom in the early 1950s.   Auto Novelties Ltd produced a number of cheap boxed sets, including an autobridge board.   The tradename was Barden.   In this canasta set the two Goodall packs are different from one another.   This can be seen most clearly in the jokers.   The number cards of the lower pack are those of contemporary Waddington packs (don't forget, from the early 1940s Waddington was printing all the cards for De La Rue and their subsidiary), whereas those of the top one are of the De La Rue style.   There is even a small difference in the KCs: the top one has a white strip next to his sword, whereas the bottom one has black.   Even the ASs are different: the top one is an unusual revival of the & Son style (pre-1897), whereas the bottom one is a crude printing of De La Rue's version.   When I got the set, the packs were mixed up, despite the fact that the backs are of a slightly different shade of dark blue.   So there's evidence of another way packs can get mixed, just by use.   It was carelessness during the making-up of the set that caused this example.

Barden canasta set, c.1952

The final example is a bit of fun, really.   The pack illustrated below is an incomplete, mixed pack from De La Rue with a consistent back design and wear and tear.   The back design is claimed to be a celebration of the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840.

You can see how well rubbed the gold backs are (some are even more indistinct), but also there are five single-figure courts and six double-ended ones (the KC is missing).   There's a note with the pack that it was found in a grace and favour apartment (it doesn't say when), but also in a mid-to-late Victorian hand there's a claim that the pack was used by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie.   If this is true (and I'm always a little sceptical of such claims without any further evidence), they must have been used during the French Emperor's visit in 1855.   This is the right date for the double-ended courts.   However, it is highly unlikely that the Queen played with a grubby, mixed pack.   It is much more likely that a servant or lady-in-waiting was given two packs after they had been somewhat used and that the packs became mixed and then used a great deal more.   Of course, we'll never know whether that's just pie in the sky, but at least this pack is evidence that the cards were made with this back from 1840 (single-ended period) up until about 1855.   They would have been in production no later than 1861, the year Prince Albert died.   Like I say, a bit of fun.

For corroborative evidence of what went on in the sale of playing cards in the 19th century read the fascinating account on the wopc website from Henry Mayhew's London labour and the London poor, first issued (serially) in the 1840s, but re-issued in 1851 in three volumes:  http://www.wopc.co.uk/uk/index2.html

The drop-down text is about halfway down the page.