New Astronomical Cards. Charles Hodges, United Kingdom (restored version by playingcarddecks.com, USA). Full regular deck, French suited, 56 cards. Size: 63mm x 89mm.
Deck make-up:
Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: 1-10, jack, queen, king.
Extras: jokers x2, "Old Frizzle" ace of spades, double-backed (sort of) card.
An excellent limited-run restoration (of 2500 copies) from 2022 (by playingcarddecks.com, printed by the USPCC) of a c.1828 original released by Charles Hodges of London. The main pip cards show assorted heavenly constellations in pictorial form. The illustrations (which are printed and then hand coloured) follow star atlases of the time which, though primarily scientific rather than artistic, used fanciful rococo depictions of their subjects laid over the locations of the stars. This deck seems to have been influenced by the style (and particularly colouring) of Urania's Mirror; or, A View of the Heavens published just a couple of years earlier, in 1824. As well as the main picture, most of the cards also give the declinations and right ascensions (i.e. the coordinates on the celestial sphere) of the constellation's primary star.
The courts feature assorted Roman gods and goddesses. There are no corner indices making it difficult to tell which cards are intended to be jacks and which the kings (both are male, obviously). The British Museum has a specimen deck to which somebody has added the letter J to the jacks in pencil to help with this! The aces simply feature a montage of some of that suit's constellations.
Though the deck here is four-suited and designed to be used for regular card games, a parallel deck was issued, without the suit / pip markings, to be used as an quasi-educational item. Additionally, a sister deck, featuring (far less interesting) geographical maps of countries (on Earth) was also released. Likewise, this also came in two versions.
Somebody at Hodges then seems to have the bright idea that you could make a bespoke game by using both the constellation cards and the map cards – the idea being to match cards using the declinations of the constellation cards and the latitudes given on the map cards (both are angles from 90° north to 90° south). So a game set of 60 cards (30 from each pack) was released, called Astrophilogeon, although the cards were this time printed in black and white.
And that's where I think a slight mistake has been made with this 2022 restoration. The cards here have the declinations shown in big coloured letters in one corner. But this was a feature only of the combined Astrophilogeon game pack, not of the original constellations-only deck (the aforementioned British Library specimen of the latter does not have them).
Piatnik also do (an inferior) version of this deck.
Click on any card to explore the design.
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Card image size, below:
The ace of spades design here is called "the old frizzle". As early as 1588, tax had been collected on playing cards. At one point, a hand stamp was put on every single card of a deck to show that the duty had been paid. This was too much trouble, so a single card, the ace of spades, was later adopted for this purpose. In 1765, it was instead decided that the government would actually print the ace of spades to a unique, complicated design (to discourage forgery) and supply this back to the manufacturer for inclusion with the rest of the pack. That's the received wisdom... however I don't quite see how the government ensured their ace of spades would match the other cards (i.e. the rest of the pack – not printed by them) in terms of exact size and colour and thickness of card etc. Anyway, this idea lasted until 1862, when the government-supplied ace was abolished (duty, however was still levied until 1960). The last government ace (first used in 1828), as included with the Hodges deck here, was the "old frizzle", though the term is often used more generically. It seems the government ace was sometimes not actually included within the pack itself (where a different design was desired), but instead glued to the slipcase – that's the case with the deck here.
The fourth picture shows a strange card included with this restoration. It's a "double-backed card" (presumably for magic tricks) but one side has the regular back (last image) but the other side has a brighter version of the same design. A double-backed card where you can tell the backs apart?
