52 Plus Joker - Cards of the Month: September 1998

Lawrence & Cohen Illuminated
From the collection of Laurence Lubliner
Illuminated playing cards - those in which gold highlights are used - are among the most beautiful decks in the world. Even a relatively straightforward design can be given an amazing sense of depth and luxury with gold highlighting.

Queen of Clubs

Card Back

While there have been any number of illuminated decks throughout history, there are only a handful of known decks of this type among early American decks:

L.I. Cohen, ca. 1840.
Lawrence & Cohen, ca. 1865
Samuel Hart, ca. 1865
Dougherty, ca. 1865
Samuel Hart, ca. 1871
NYCC Paris Exposition, ca. 1878

Ace of Spades

King of Diamonds

This month's display consists of cards from the Lawrence & Cohen deck, considered by some to be the most extensively illuminated of these.

Unfortunately, digital scanning cannot really show the richness of the illumination. The way it glows and catches the light has to be seen first-hand. To emphasize the illumination, we have added a touch of digital animation to a few of the cards, only visible if your web browser supports "GIF animation".

Ten of Clubs

Jack of Hearts

This hard-to-find deck, with its distinctive dark blue spade ace, and extensive use of gold throughout, is quite a find for the collector lucky enough to have one in his or her collection.

This deck is NY10 in the Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards