made after the image prints. He says that the engravers who made cards also made images, and he adds the curious fact that in some places cards and images were called by the same name.[1]
The curt and careless manner in which the business of card-making is mentioned in the old records is an indication that the process used was not novel. We do not find in the writings of any author of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries a statement that the earliest playing cards were made by a new art. That they were made by block-printing at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Italy and Germany seems clearly established. That they were made at a corresponding period in Spain and France, where cards were as common, cannot be proved. It is probable that the Germans derived their knowledge of cards from Italy, but the evidences of an early manufacture by printing are decidedly in favor of southern Germany, a district in which the most famous image prints have been found, and which, at a later period, was the birthplace of many eminent engravers on wood.
- ↑ Wood-cuts of sacred subjects were known to the common people of Suabia, and the adjacent districts, by the name of Halgen or Halglein, saints or little saints, a word which, in course of time, was also applied to prints of all kinds. In France also, the earliest prints were known as dominos, or lords, a word which was intended to convey the same meaning. The maker of prints was known as a dominotier, whether he made profane cards or pious images. In time the word so far declined from its first meaning that it was applied not only to printers of cards and images, but to the makers of fancifully colored wall-papers. Versuch der Ursprung der Spielkarten, etc., vol. ii, p. 174.
