Finding the 1978 Archive
The story of how we uncovered the original printing plates for the Skyline Archive Edition — and what that discovery taught us about what makes a collectible deck truly irreplaceable.
The Estate Sale in Geelong
It started with an email. A reader of our newsletter — we'll call him R. — wrote to tell us he'd attended an estate sale in Geelong in late 2023 and found something unusual: a wooden flat file, the kind used by commercial printers and drafting studios, containing what appeared to be original lithographic plates and press proofs for a playing card deck from the late 1970s.
R. had no particular interest in playing cards. He was a graphic designer by trade, and he recognised the plates as significant printing artefacts before he understood their subject matter. He bought the entire flat file for forty dollars and photographed everything inside before reaching out to us.
The photographs he sent were remarkable. Twelve plates — one for each suit pip value — plus four court card plates and two back design plates. All hand-drawn, all in perfect registration, all dated in pencil on the reverse: March 1978.
Identifying the Deck
We spent three weeks cross-referencing the design against known Australian card catalogues from the period. The back pattern — a stylised city skyline rendered in geometric bands — matched no commercially distributed deck we could find in any reference. The court cards used a slightly abstracted version of the standard English pattern, with one notable difference: the pip suits were drawn with thicker outlines than typical, giving the cards a bold graphic quality that felt ahead of its time.
The breakthrough came when we found a handwritten inventory note tucked into the back of one of the plate sleeves. It referenced a client name: "Skyline Club, Melbourne — Private commission, print run 1,800." A private commission for a members' club. That explained why no commercial catalogues recorded it — the deck was never sold to the public.
"Private commission decks are the dark matter of card collecting. They existed, they were used, and they left almost no paper trail. When you find documentation for one, it's genuinely exciting."
— James Wei, Collector and Researcher, Sydney
The Skyline Club
Research into the Skyline Club itself turned up little. Melbourne in the late 1970s had a number of private social clubs operating out of licensed premises in the CBD and inner suburbs, and many kept deliberately low profiles. What we were able to establish is that the club operated from 1974 to approximately 1983, that it occupied a space in a building on Collins Street that has since been redeveloped, and that its membership included a number of figures from Melbourne's commercial art and print industry community.
This last detail made the deck's quality make sense. The people who commissioned it would have had professional relationships with printers, understood the production process, and cared about how the cards looked and handled. This wasn't a novelty deck. It was a working deck, made to a high standard by people who knew what a high standard meant.
The 1,800 Print Run
The inventory note specified 1,800 decks. Given the deck's private distribution and the intervening five decades, the number of surviving sealed examples is almost certainly in the single figures. Opened and used decks in collector condition — free of major wear, with intact tuck box — may number a few dozen more.
We were able to verify two sealed examples in private Australian collections and one in a European collection assembled by a dealer who specialises in mid-century Antipodean ephemera. A fourth is held by a New South Wales library as part of a broader collection of Australian commercial print material. None are currently for sale.
From Discovery to Edition
The existence of the original plates raised an immediate question: was it possible, and appropriate, to use them as the basis for a contemporary edition?
We spent considerable time working through this question. The original commissioner — the Skyline Club — no longer exists. The designer of the plates is unknown; the inventory note lists no individual name. There is no known rights holder. After consulting with a specialist in intellectual property as it relates to historical print artefacts, and after a period of public notice with no responses, we proceeded with the project under the reasonable belief that the work had entered the public domain.
The plates themselves were not used for printing — they are fragile and historically significant as objects in their own right. Instead, we commissioned high-resolution scans of each plate, then worked with a digital restoration artist to clean up the decades of surface oxidation and minor damage without altering the underlying design. The result was a faithful digital reproduction of the original artwork, suitable for modern offset printing.
Production Decisions
Our brief for the Skyline Archive Edition was simple: produce a deck that honours the original without pretending to be it. We kept the back design and court card artwork faithful to the 1978 originals. We updated the pip cards to modern standards for handling performance. We chose a premium casino-grade stock — smooth finish, 280 gsm — that approximates the handling profile of well-preserved 1970s card stock without attempting to replicate its particular aged quality.
The tuck box was designed around the geometric language of the back pattern, with blind embossing and a single gold foil accent on the logo. The edition is numbered: 2,500 decks, deliberately modest, making no claim to be rarer than it is.
What the Archive Taught Us
The 1978 archive project crystallised something we had always believed but not always been able to articulate clearly: the best collectible decks are the ones with genuine stories behind them. Not invented provenance, not marketing mythology, but real history — specific people, specific places, specific decisions made at specific moments in time.
The Skyline Archive Edition exists because someone in Melbourne in 1978 cared enough about playing cards to commission something worth caring about. That care, preserved in a wooden flat file for forty-five years, is ultimately what we're selling. The deck is the carrier. The story is the thing.