Those playing ‘The Game of Commerce’ compete to monopolise one area of the market by collecting a complete set of six cards of a single suit; the eight suits invented for the game are Pork, Sugar, Cotton, Corn, Coffee, Oates, Flour and Butter. They must win cards so by yelling bids to other players, not taking turns but instead winning cards by out-shouting the others!



The instructions explain: ‘Take from your hand a card or cards of similar suit those which you wish to trade for others, and holding them up, call briskly, trade two, or three, “as the case may be.” Keep calling, never mind about turn, keep right at it, all call together the more the merrier, never mind the noise, stick to it until a trade is made... Commerce is a noisy game.’ Players are warned, however, that they “cannot grab or pull cards out of another hand under penalty of forfeiting 25 points”.



The maker, Jacob Ottmann (1849-1889), was born in Meisenheim, Prussia and emigrated to New York with his mother and seven brothers and sisters in 1863. Ottmann began his lithographic career from 1867 as a clerk at Ferdinand Mayer & Company, after deciding against joining his family’s Fulton Market meat business. From 1874 he became a junior partner with the firm of Mayer and Merkel, printers of the popular ‘Puck’, the first magazine to be printed in colour. Ottmann took over the business in 1885, renaming it J. Ottmann Lithographing Company and continuing in business until it merged into United States Printing and Lithographing Company in the first decade of the 20th century.