MAGICAL MUSICAL CARDS
[PLAYING CARDS.]
Cartes Magiques Musicales. 1001 Danses pour Piano. / Magical Musical Cards or Thousand and one Dances for Piano.
Paris, Bass, c. 1830.
32 chromolithographed playing cards (French suits), each card c. 105 x 68 mm, printed rectos only, each card with miniature playing cards to upper half and two great staves of music to lower half, staves on Kings titled ‘Galop’ and ‘Polka’, imprint to King of Clubs; some very light foxing and the odd mark or abrasion, but a beautifully preserved set; housed in the original wooden box, sliding lid with original printed title label, interior of box with original printed rules in English pasted in; box lacking two sides, scuffed and worn.
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Cartes Magiques Musicales. 1001 Danses pour Piano. / Magical Musical Cards or Thousand and one Dances for Piano.
The complete Piquet deck of these rare and unusual musical playing cards including the English rules for the game, a delightful example of a nineteenth-century parlour game produced for the Anglo-French market.
The game, subtitled 1001 Danses pour Piano and apparently arranged by ‘un maître bien connu’, centres around combining the thirty-two cards to create short pieces of music, with each playing card having two great staves printed on it, labelled ‘Polka’ and ‘Galop’ on the King of each suit. The deck is designed so that when the cards are placed in order (King, Queen, Jack, Ace, 10, 9, 8, 7, regardless of suit) the printed music produces a combination of a ‘Thousand and One’ dances, either polkas or galops depending on which stave one follows, with the first four cards of each suit forming the first part and the remaining four cards forming the second.
The choice of such lively dances makes clear that the game was meant to be enjoyed in a group, as a parlour game or party entertainment, rather than purely for the purpose of musical education. Both the polka and galop were extremely popular ballroom dances in both France and England during the nineteenth century; produced in France and titled in French and accompanied by printed instructions in (slightly stilted) English, the present game was evidently designed to capitalise on the fashion for the two dances sweeping Europe at the time.
Rare: OCLC locates three copies, at the Bibliothèque nationale (giving Édouard Vert as the printer), Indiana, and Harvard; to this we can add a copy at Yale (Cary Collection of Playing Cards, FRA250).
Verame, Les merveilleuses cartes à jouer du XIXè siècle (1989), p.118.
