Timon Schroeter's Emblematic Cards

The German Educationalist Timon Schroeter designed a new pattern of playing cards based on a synthesis of the Swiss and French patterns.

We read in a contemporary account

In 1897, Dr Timon Schroeter donated 2,000 square metres of land in the western district of Jena for the construction of a home for the homeless.  Since then, art cards - building stones - have been put into circulation at prices of 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 Marks, and by the end of 1892 a total of 75,000 Mk had been collected in this way. Dr Schroeter has also recently published an illustrious collection of autobiographies and original works by German writers, numbering 300; these make up a superb volume, which is sold for the benefit of the charity: For our home. Colourful donations by contemporary German writers and thinkers for the German Writers' Home in Jena compiled by Dr Tımon Schroeter. Leipzig. Publisher of the Illustrierte Zeitung.

While the cards were to raise funds for his project, the patterns had a philosophical basis. The aces for his four suits describe the new purpose with a motto each:

The four suits were (to coin names):

• Clacorns (symbolising strength, synthesising Clubs and Acorns. motto Be strong!),

• Diabells (symbolising prudence, synthesising Diamonds and Bells, motto Be wise!),

• a version of Hearts (symbolising faithfulness, motto Be True!) that merged the stylisations of the two traditions, and

• Speafs (symbolising diligence, synthesising Spades and Leaves, motto Be diligent!).

The intended universal appeal was shown by the mottoes in four languages.

He produced four packs, named after his daughters, and had various iconogrpahy to reflect the modernity of his times. You can see these packs in the card collections at the British Museum.

It's rare that an individual has such an extraordinary design vision, and rarer still that it is so elegantly fulfilled. There is a striking modernity to the pips, and the use of shading to indicate the second nature works as well today as it did then. While there have been other reissues of the cards, they are photoreproductions with all the problems that the process entails. We have redrawn the pips from scratch, to make the best possible cards for play.

We made a new version with court card imagery from prints of his time that have some renown as representations of the latest word in fashion.  We've also made them 4-index cards, at the request of a number of left-handed friends

Here are the courts for Clacorns, with their ace

Here are the courts for Diabells with theirs

Here are the Hearts

And here are the Speafs

For the fool card, we have used an engraving by the Crowquills:

Because we are Australian, we made the recreation available as a 500 set, and you can put aside the extra cards to play other conventional games.

We've also made various Tarock and Schock decks, which we'll talk about in another post.

If you want to play 500, or Marriage, or Preference, (or Bridge, Poker, etc) with Timon Schroeter's extraordinary cards, you can buy a copy printed-on-demand at Make Playing Cards, here.