Dating de la rue playing cards

The plates used by a maker may, in fact, be unrelated, as in the case of De La Rue’s first designs and their third one.

This is essentially the basis of my book The standard English pattern. That makes these designs much less interesting to me.Īs I said on page 40, my interest in stamp variants led me to apply the same principles to playing cards. Some firms, on the other hand, such as Carta Mundi and Fournier, have such consistent print runs that no variation can be detected.

The same approach can be applied to modern computer-based printing, where there is variation, as in Chinese versions of the English pattern. So, I thought it might be helpful to explain my approach to cards printed by the later methods from metal plates or lithographic stones.

The book that Paul Bostock and I have recently published deals in detail with the analysis of wood-block courts (see here for details).