Standard complete deck of 52 illuminated playing cards in very rare original brown paper score keeping box with rotating metal hands, ca. 1840s. 52 playing cards, block printed in 4 colors on ivory coated stock with asterix design on verso, Ace of Spades with Eagle holding blue banner, heavily inked over "New York" text. Edges rounded off, each ca. 6.3 x 9 cm.  The Beinecke Library’s Cary Playing Card Collection holds a variety of Cohen decks, both complete and incomplete, but none identical to that offered here.

Playing cards are difficult to produce, requiring special paper and coatings as well as a capacity for color printing, and their manufacture came late to America and probably did not begin until after the Revolution. (Dawson, Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards, p. 9) Indeed the earliest extant American cards, by Jazaniah Ford of the Boston area, seem to date from the 1790s. Given the heavy use to which they were subjected, all such early cards are rare.

Offered here is one such deck, made by the New York firm of Lewis I. Cohen. Cohen had begun his career as a stationer but made his mark as a manufacturer, becoming among other things the first in America to produce lead pencils, and in 1832 he published his first pack of cards. In 1835 he “invented a marvelous new machine, which revolutionized the entire playing card industry” by printing four colors in a single impression. (Dawson, p. 45)  By 1844 Cohen’s success necessitated a move to larger quarters, and he moved his plant to a large building at 184-190 William Street, New York.