The Chinese predilection for games such as _Mah Jongg_ is an ancient tradition; and an early use of block printing--long before it came into Europe--is the production of _sheet dice_ or, as we should say, playing cards. As charms--pictures of saints--and as playing cards, wood-block printing established a market in Europe at least a century before Gutenberg's Bible. Fortunately, we know some facts about this, as often by a happy dispensation. For the age-long obstruction of the legal mind to progress conspires with its obsessional drive to record its own ineptitudes and us to perpetuate milestones of progress by the resistance it offers to innovation. Thus we have the record of a prohibition issued by the Provost of Paris in A.D. 1397 against working men playing cards on working days; and there were many such prohibitions in German towns about this time. We have also originals of contemporaneous wood-block prints portraying saints for sale at shrines by travelling pedlars and palmers, encouraged to foregather by papal indulgences for the pilgrims.
Like _Snap_ and other children's card games of today, the first playing cards were wholly pictorial, in suits exhibiting the feudal hierarchy, starting with the king and queen. The joker is a relic. Sometimes, the wood block of the picture card accommodated a title or epithet, and often the _Heiligen_, or shrine charms promoted by the clergy as an antidote to the carnal indulgence of card-playing, would carry the name of the saint. Either way, the next step was inevitable. We are now in sight of printing as a medium for the rapid circulation of knowledge; but we have to take stock of several features of the folk ways of Europe in the Middle Ages before we take the next hurdle.
When we reach the threshold of the fifteenth century, writing is no longer the prerogative of a priestly caste. There are merchants with big balances in the wool trade, the herring trade and the spice trade. There are pilots who have to rely on their _rutter_ books to navigate cargoes of the spice trade over long ocean routes. There is a mounting volume of manorial accountancy and litigation connected with the exchange of produce between the countryside and the boroughs where master-craftsmen and merchants are now aspiring to domestic conveniences heretofore inaccessible to the landed gentry. All this signifies the pre-existence of considerable semi-literate personnel to provide a market for the products of Gutenberg's trade. It is necessary to say this, because school history too often exhibits the Church and the Law as the custodians of literacy.