“When the Chinese invented paper around 200 B.C. . . . the first uses they found for it were as writing material, money, and playing cards. All three applications spread along trade routes, especially to places where divination and gambling with straws, beads, and pebbles (called lots, as in lottery) were already common. Since card games could be made more complex than the casting of lots, they tended to appeal to more literate cultures. Once priests, scribes, and warriors took up cards, they were further disseminated, along with the means to produce them, via conquest. . . . Christian crusaders and Venetian merchants eventually brought cards back to Europe, where Spaniards and Italians began playing with forty-card decks, and Germans made do for a while with thirty-six. By the early fourteenth century . . . Persians had developed a deck of fifty-two cards arranged in four suits, each with ten numerical ranks and three hand-painted court cards. The suits were Coins, Cups, Swords, and Polo Sticks, emblematic of the officers providing a sultan’s court with money, food and drink, military protection, and sporting entertainment. As these and similar decks made their way to Italy, polo sticks became scepters or cudgels, which eventually turned into our clubs.”

—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.