18th-century playing card recycled as a funeral notice.
[Playing card] / [Ephemeral printing]. [Two of Spades]. Le Frere, Soeurs & Beau-frere font announcer la Mort de Mr. Nicolas Hospies, Prêtre, leur Frere, décédé le 22 December 1789, dont l’Enterrement & Exêques se feront Samedi, 26 du dit Mois, à 10 heures & demie, dans l’Église de Sainte Marie-Magdelaine. R.I.P. S.l. [Brussels]: s.n., 1789. [8.3 x 5.7 cm], [1] f. playing card block printed in black and on verso letterpress text. Well preserved.
An unusual example of 18th-century ephemeral printing: This standard playing card (2 of Spades) was repurposed by printing on its verso a letterpress announcement for a funeral.
Early modern playing cards were often recycled as scratch paper or index cards, their ubiquity and handy size making them convenient for scribbling annotations of all sorts.
Only very rarely, however, were they re-used as printing supports. Presumably this was both because the design of playing cards was an inappropriate distraction for most occasions, and the small size of the cards greatly limited the sort of printing that could be added to them.
The text on this example can be translated, “The brother, sisters, and brother-in-law announce the death of Mr. Nicolas Hospies, priest, their brother, who died on December 22, 1789. His burial and funeral mass will take place on Saturday, the 26th of the said month, at 10:30 a.m., in the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene. R.I.P.” This was the church of Sainte Marie-Magdelaine in Brussels, where Nicolas Hospies was a priest.
The card presumably would have been distributed to the family and friends of the deceased so that they would know when to attend the service. Many copies must originally have been printed, but I have located no other surviving examples.
But other reprinted playing cards of this sort are known. There seems to have been a minor fad in the Flanders (mostly in Brussels) in the 1780s and 1790s for printing obituary or other mortuary announcements on the versos of playing cards. I can only imagine that the aleatory symbolism of a game of chance was seen to align well with the vagaries of death.