Bicycle Playing Cards Bicycle Playing Cards Bicycle Playing Cards is a brand of playing cards. Since 1885, the Bicycle brand has been manufactured by the United States Printing Company, which, in 1894, became the United States Playing Card Company (USPCC) of Cincinnati. "Bicycle" is a trademark of that company. The name Bicycle was chosen to reflect . Bicycle is a standard 52-card deck of red and black colored cards. Also known as the French deck, each card may have one of the four suits: spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts. The numbers on the cards range from 2 to 10, then proceed onward to
Curse of Scotland cards. It contains a "Pope" card (and, indeed, a "Popess") but there seems to be no connection with the Pope Joan card game, even though the popess may have derived from the mythical Pope Joan. The expression "Curse of Scotland" is sometimes used simply to refer to an occasion of bad luck at cards and can also refer to generally unwanted situations in Scotland, such as swarms of midges. There is a theatrical superstition, sometimes called the "Scottish curse", that speaking the name "Macbeth" in the theatre brings bad luck. Hence "the Scottish Play" is used to refer to Shakespeare's