18th-century playing card recycled as a funeral notice.
[Playing card]. [Three of Diamonds]. Madame De Lannoy, née Fisco, donne part de la Mort de Messire Pierre Joseph Norbert de Lannoy, Conseiller & Procureur-Général du Conseil Souverain de Brabant, décédé le 12 de Juillet 1788, dont le Service & Enterrement se seront Lundi 14. du même mois à sept heures du matin, dans l’Eglise Collegiale & Paroissale de SS. Michel & Gudule. R.I.P. S.l. [Brussels]: s.n., 1788. [8.5 x 5.3 cm], [1] f. playing card block printed in red, letterpress text on verso. Well preserved.
An unusual example of 18th-century ephemeral printing: This standard playing card (3 of Diamonds) 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, “Madame De Lannoy, née Fisco, gives notice of the Death of Sir Pierre Joseph Norbert de Lannoy, Councilor & Attorney-General of the Sovereign Council of Brabant, who died on July 12, 1788, whose service & burial will be on Monday the 14th of the same month at seven o’clock in the morning, in the Collegiate & Parish Church of SS. Michael & Gudule. R.I.P.” This is the church of Saints-Michel-et-Gudule in Brussels (Sint-Michiel en Sint-Goedele).
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.