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"The appearance of the typical English playing card, as we know it today, is well known throughout the world because of the ubiquity of card games like bridge, rummy, poker and canasta. It derives originally from designs produced in France before 1516. These show entirely credible and well-executed pictures of elegant persons wearing the typical elaborate court costumes of the period (on English cards these are Tudor costumes). These designs, like others, were soon disfigured by uninformed and unskilled copying by block makers, particularly by incompetent English artisans, who produced the grotesque distortions from which our modern cards are ultimately descended."
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