I did post this elsewhere, but figured that someone in this forum might be able to help out. I recently was given an old '45 Texan deck with Palmetto Backs, that turned out to be a stripper deck.

I could use some help identifying it, or at least figuring out roughly what year or era it might be from.

Inside it has a paper that that says "Directions for Using The Wizard's Pack of Cards", which has descriptions of 15 effects that can be performed with the deck. And yes, the cards are tapered, so it is a Stripper deck.

Front of the tuck box: '45 Texan Playing Cards, The U.S. Playing Card Co, Cincinnati USA, Russell & Morgan Factories
Back of the tuck box: Texan Playing Cards, Palmetto Back

Below are some photos of what it looks like.

First off; these were probably handmade, as evidenced by the extreme lack of subtleness in the cut or cleanup.

Second; as you probably have noticed, there are labels on the box (apparently holding it together) from a stamp collectors organization in the UK.

As far as dating: contact the USPCC and see if they have any archival records on a deck with the Ace of Spades 8-20 designator.

Happy hunting!

That's great advice to look more closely at the stamp collectors organization label. I managed to date those as being from 1926 - more on that below.

I did contact USPCC prior to posting this, but I have the impression they only check the decks they produce currently. Here's what they wrote:

"We checked our current playing cards product list and we were unable to locate these cards. USPC does not maintain a library or archives of discontinued cards. There are a number of collector's books available to purchase on the Internet or visit your local bookstore or library for available titles. Mrs. Robinson's Playing Card Collector's Handbook published in 1955 offers a timeline of early Bicycle playing cards. www.jimknapp.com/Cards/Bicycle.htm. If you are unable to locate them there, a search on the Internet would be the best place to look for your desired card deck."

So that doesn't get me much further, because it's quite obvious that this isn't a current deck. As for Jim Knapp's website, some Texan Palmetto's are listed on his page with Non-Bicycle cards here: http://www.jimknapp.com/Cards/Non-Bicycle.htm
It's item #26 on that page, but the cards he shows are ones produced in Ontario Canada, and were a much more recent version of this deck. These more recent versions were published in the 1990s/2000s. In 1998 Jeff Busby even wrote a book about them entitled "Secret of the Palmettos" (available here) that was about edge-marking, which relates to the one-way design of the backs. But these decks had English/French on the cover (as you can see in pictures 1, 2, 3, and 4), and they mention Ontario on the Ace of Spades; clearly different from the much older 45 Texan deck with Palmetto backs that I have.



However, there's a few more parts to the puzzle about this deck, some of which add more mystery, and others of which start clearing things up.

1. First of all the tuck box flap has an unusual design and shape - is this unique to a particular era?



2. Here's another interesting thing: on the reverse side of this flap, in pencil, there's some faint writing in pencil.



It's hard to make out, but I recognized the second word: DEDIT. And because I'm an amateur magician, that rang a bell. Specifically this bell. "MUTUS NOMEN DEDIT COCIS" is a well known mnemonic used for a particular card trick effect (which is based on a principle first described in 1769 by Gilles-Edme Guyot).

Looking more closely, I realized that the pencil writing used a different series of words than what is normally used today: "CICOS DEDIT TUMUS NEMON". That's a variation used in "The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims" by Andrew Steinmetz, first published in 1870 (example page here). I wonder when the MUTUS NOMEN DEDIT COCIS list was popularized? Evidently the person who wrote CICOS DEDIT TUMUS NEMON on the box flap was either unfamiliar with the more common words used, or learned them instead from Steinmetz' book, or from another source.

But one thing we can conclude from this is: at one point a person who owned this deck was using it for card magic. Which isn't surprising, given that it is a stripper deck.

3. But there's more. On both sides of the tuck box, a stamp has been used to keep it together.



And when you put it together, here's what that stamp looks like:



My son did a bit more research about the Junior Philatelic Society (JPS) in London, and discovered that this stamp was issued in 1926. If it is from that era, that would date the deck around the late 1920s. It's not definitive evidence, but you'd imagine that you wouldn't get a stamp like this and only use it to fix a deck box 20 or more years later. This would have to narrow down the date to some time close to 1930, which is around 90 years ago.

4. There's one final piece of evidence I found in my online research. On a webpage here about the history of the USPCC, I found the following: "USPC expanded internationally in the 1910s, establishing the International Playing Card Company in 1914, initially for product distribution to Canada. Successful sales in that country led the company to establish a manufacturing facility in Windsor, Ontario, in 1928. [u]Among the unique brands marketed to Canadian customers was Texan 45, a style popular in Quebec since its introduction in the 1930s[/u]." I've not been able to confirm this, but it does give a date that is around the same era from the Junior Philatelic Society stamp.

I'd love to be able to verify that statement, and find out when the Texan 45 was originally produced, for how long, and whether it was officially produced as a stripper deck for magicians or whether that was a custom alteration to the deck by a magician (and just put instructions for it in the box). Another thing I'm still left wondering is this: does the "8-20" that is under the Ace of Spades in tiny print give any definitive way of identifying this deck?

Using "fuzzy logic" and the fact that I've never been able to get a reasonable answer from USPCC:

Since being taken over by Tupperware's mother company, designators indicating week and year of print run have been added to the face of the Ace of Spades. Those are the 4 digits preceding the alpha and numeric lot number ie: 0000-A0000B. One could assume (and we all know what happens when we assume) that this coding system is not original to the Kentucky crew and that waaaaaaaaay back the guys at Russell & Morgan and USPCC thought about a similar method of coding. Therefore, the "8-20" on your deck could indicate the deck was printed during the 8th week of 1920 or August of 1920. Like I said "fuzzy logic". This would, however, place the deck in the right time period for the card box to be dilapidated to the point of someone trying to keep it together with, albeit, a stamp label from a philatelic organization. I don't think that Scotch Tape had been invented yet.

As for the manufacture solely for use by magicians, what this deck maybe is the result of discards from a supplier of crooked gambling ephemera who then sold them to magic dealers of the time knowing that, then as today, magician's will buy anything. Again, "fuzzy logic".

Continued happy hunting.

Cheers!;)

Thanks for that additional information Stanyon, that's helpful and really appreciated!

I look forward to any insights or observations others might have.

Being a former philatelist, I had tried to nail down a date range but didn't get too far. The JPS started in 1899 and later changed its name to the National Philatelic Society but I could not find when this occurred. The last reference to the JPS I could find was in a magazine dated 1926. I could easily believe your deck dates from the 1920s. The only thing that bothers me about that dating is that one of the buildings in the NYC skyline on the stamp looks suspiciously like the Chrysler building which was built in 1930. The ocean liner design is of a type that could have been built any time between early nineteen hundreds to mid to late twenties although I could not find an image of a single stack liner with that mast configuration (probably stamp designer took some artistist license with the drawing).