Jack of Hearts, from the Transparent Playing Cards series (N220) issued by Kinney Bros. 1888

Curator: This is the Jack of Hearts, part of the Transparent Playing Cards series, dating back to 1888. It was produced by the Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company. Editor: Oh, it’s fascinating how spare the lines are. Almost ghostly, floating on that aged paper. You can almost smell the faint, nostalgic scent of tobacco and games gone by! Curator: Right, the lithographic print reveals the industrial means by which even seemingly innocuous objects like playing cards entered mass circulation. What looks delicate here points to complex capitalist infrastructure. Editor: Infrastructure! That’s quite a thing to say. All I get is a sense of the ephemeral. He seems like someone about to vanish with a puff of smoke—ironic, I suppose, given his origin. I’m also captivated by the figure’s confident side-profile—all of these sharp angles give an illusion of motion despite its stillness. Curator: His repetition here connects to the seriality inherent to industrial production. Think about how Ukiyo-e prints used similar techniques for vastly different subject matter but sharing the underlying material production models. How the standardization facilitates production is far from ethereal. Editor: I get your angle, and yes, of course, the company used print production for this design and others; what jumps out, though, is how this single playing card—divorced from its deck—becomes intensely human! So…flawed, really, in its crude linework and design, don't you agree? It makes one feel compassion, despite that industrial machine! Curator: The roughness actually humanizes it—showing the labour embedded in print manufacture, and perhaps hinting at labor disputes during this Gilded Age and how such labor impacts artistic creation! The materiality gives us ways of reflecting production cycles embedded in popular leisure. Editor: Exactly, right! It's quite romantic and really speaks volumes, doesn’t it? I almost imagine picking this card up, smelling its essence of a forgotten world and instantly turning into a poet. So that you think, makes this artifact utterly sublime. Curator: Indeed. It reminds us that what may appear straightforward actually involved layered material processes shaped profoundly by time, labor, and consumer cultures. Editor: Ah, well, thanks for reminding me of production amidst reverie!