Rare set of cards sell for £15,000 at auction

The 53 cards were produced in 1676, during the reign of King Charles II, by cartographer and publisher Robert Morden.
Each card features the name and a map of a different county, and names of its principal towns. Newbury, Lambourn, Hunger-ford and Wickham appear on the Berkshire card together with the width, length and circumference of the county.
The Berkshire card is the three of diamonds.
The court cards have the king depicted as Charles II, the queen, his wife Catherine of Braganza, and the jack, various male heads.
Auctioneers Sotheby’s said: “For many counties, the Morden playing card is the earliest separate printed county map to show any roads.”
Maps and atlases expert at Sotheby’s, Catherine Slowther, said : “As playing cards were normally a gambling device, one might not expect to find them adapted to educational uses.
“The output of playing cards was seriously curtailed during Cromwellian times, when both cards and play were regarded as sinful. This Puritan attitude resulted in the wholesale destruction of many fine sets of cards.
“They were replaced by packs of an instructional or educational nature, embracing geography, history and similar subjects. The last edition of the Morden playing cards, in 1770, has the suit mark removed, but more detail added.”
The cards were auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, on November 12.
They had been put up for sale following the death in January of the man who used to own them, Jaime ‘Jimmy’ Ortiz-Patino, who created the Valderrama golf course in Spain. He was also thepresident of the World Bridge Federation between 1976 and 1986and owned one of the greatest collections of playing cards in private hands.