Word: decking
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...Once again something old looks very new. The "Jesus deck" of the U.S. Games System cards [Feb. 19] would have sold well in the late 18th century. Moravians, Methodists and even Baptists of the era silenced gossiping tongues and profitably filled idle hours with "Draw Cards," "Divine Amusement" and "Mr. Charles Wesley's Scripture Cards...
...when Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis steamed in from Haiti on their 325-ft. yacht Christina to visit Rose Kennedy. Hidden behind her usual oversize sunglasses, with a kerchief pulled low on her forehead, Jackie cut the press dead. Ari, tanned and shirtless, waved, smiled and carried on from the deck. Later Ari showed off his Greek dances at a party. Jackie said they were Greek by way of Argentina -Ari's home for a number of years. Ari was too busy dancing to hear...
...very useful in life; it generates kindness, and consolidates society." Presumably he was thinking of picquet or bezique, rather than an all-night killer session at seven-card stud, but Johnson's point has been true for centuries. Yet no player today could guess, from his impersonal deck with its stiff, bright kings, queens and jacks, mass-produced and slippery for fast dealing, how complicated the ancestry of the modern playing card was-or how various and fine in craftsmanship. Discovering this is one of the pleasures of the Yale University Library's current show in New Haven...
...division of the deck into four suits probably had origins in divination, as a reference to the four quarters of the world. But the four-suit deck is largely a Western convention: there are round Hindu cards with ten suits representing the ten incarnations of Vishnu, and some Persian decks had five-dancer, queen, soldier, king and lion (see opposite page, top left). In the classical fortuneteller's deck, the tarot, the suits were four: cups, swords, coins and batons. Each suit had 14 cards, with four court cards that included a knight. To this pack of 56 were...
However the deck was codified, the materials and designs were not. Sheet silver cards appeared in Augsburg at the turn of the 17th century, made for Orthodox Jews whose religious laws forbade them to touch pasteboard decks at Passover. Silk and cotton or plaited straw were inlaid into the cards to reproduce gay theatrical costumes in their original fabric, like the 17th century Pulcinello opposite. The superb min-chiate (or tarot) cards done in the 15th century by Bonifacio Bembo for Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, are so elaborate in their detailed painting, embossment and gilding that they could seldom...