1928 Cine Manual Playing Cards Set and Checklist

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

It’s In The Details’

Title	Cine Manual Playing Cards
Year	1928
Size	2 1/4″ x 3 5/8″
Images	Color
Type	Game Cards
Number in Set	48

Cine Manual Playing Cards Overview

Cine Manual Wrestling Card The Cine Manual set included a Spanish set of 48 playing/trading cards featuring a variety of sports and non-sports items. Among the four major sports is the sport of baseball.

Other popular sports in the set include tennis, soccer, wrestling, and boxing. In addition, while many players are generic, some actual athletes are included, such as boxers Max Schmeling and Paulino Uzcudun. Non-sports personalities are here, too. Two are silent film star Charlie Chaplin and American actor Tom Mix. Overall, the set is an odd, eclectic mix of characters.

The cards are quite rare and difficult to find in the U.S. However, they are often found in high-grade condition, which is shocking because they are printed on a thinner, almost paper-like stock.

Cards all have numbers in the corners like standard playing cards. And, also like American playing cards, more cards are assigned more than one number. There are four cards per number and the numbers go up to 12, slightly different from American playing cards which typically go to 13 cards per suit.

However, different suits are not easily identifiable. They appear to be represented by swords, clubs, trophies, and yellow balls. Unlike suits on American cards, though, they are not consistent as the placement varies and the number of each item depicted generally represents the number of the card. For example, for the swords suit on the wrestling card pictured here, the card number is eight so eight swords appear.

Also notable is that these playing cards have square corners — not the typical rounded ones you usually see with decks of standard playing cards.

Baseball, er, Basse-Ball

No. 5 in the set is titled ‘Jugadores de Basse-Ball.’ The players on the card, however, do not look like they are playing the American sport. Instead, three players are shown with clubs of some sort along with a small ball.

Then there’s the matter of the translation. The word ‘Basse-Ball’ on the card makes it seem like an attempt to state the sport is baseball. But the cards are printed in Spanish and the Spanish word (at least nowadays) for baseball is beisbol. If baseball was the intended name, however, the translation printed would be ‘baseball players.’

Despite all of that, the sport being (poorly) depicted is baseball. As this book mentions, the sport was spelled in various ways in Spanish-speaking lands and Basse-Ball was one of those.

But while the game is cleared up, the artist certainly did a poor job with this one. The crude drawings found in the set are one thing. But this looks nothing like the sport we know as baseball. If anything, the players depicted look like golfers or even field hockey players since they each are holding clubs and a small ball appears to be on the ground. It seems likely that the artist was unfamiliar with the game.

The baseball card, despite the poor rendition and the lack of an identifiable subject, is the most desirable card in the set to most collectors.