Stacked Decks

Imagine a group of guys in the late 1950s getting together for the weekly poker game. There’s a brand new deck of cards that came in a plain brown wrapper that was purchased at a gas station. On the back of the cards is a picture of a drooling wolf and on the other side each card has the photograph of a fabulous nude or semi-nude woman. These card decks had names like “Art Studies Deck” and “Models of the World Deck.”

In Stacked Decks: The Art and History of Erotic Playing Cards (Quirk Books, 2006), Mark Rotenburg, who may have the largest collection of vintage erotica in the world, chronicles the history and design of erotic playing cards from the 1830s to the 1970s. The primary reason to get a copy of Stacked Decks, however, is not for the text but for the pictures.

The heyday for girlie decks was the 1950s and 60s. Then as now, sex sells. There are card decks with advertisements for businesses featuring pin up girls. (It reminds me of the auto parts calendars which my Father always had on the wall in the office at his Automotive Radiator Repair Shop which usually featured a scantily clad girl.) As time went on the images on the cards became more graphic. By the 1970s full frontal nudity and even cards depicting hard core sex acts had become normal.

I am definitely a fan of cheesecake. The images from the forties, fifties and early sixties have a certain playful innocence about them that became lost as pornography became ever more hardcore during the so-called “sexual revolution.” During the late sixties and seventies one could find "underground decks" like “Girl Fight Decks," “Lesbian Love Decks,” and "Intercourse Illustrated Decks."

Even though erotic decks of cards were not sold openly until the late 60s and 70s and were illegal in some jurisdictions, they apparently proliferated. (I first knew there was such a thing as decks of cards with naked girls on them after a trip to Panama City, Florida with my grandparents in the seventies).

I am particularly fascinated with the advertising cards from the fifties which have a picture of a scantily clad pin-up girl on the back of the deck and the name of the business. These were pretty much masculine businesses like gas stations, package stores and machine companies and we can assume were only given away to male customers!

There are some photos of very beautiful women in this book. Anyone interested in vintage erotica, the history of sex in culture, or lovely women should definitely check this book out.

Vintage Erotica Collector and Historian Mark Rotenberg