When were numbers and letters put on playing cards?

When were numbers and letters put on playing cards? Bill Calloway Wilmington, Delaware I contacted an old friend, Dr. Lafitte, an expert on the history of cards and gambling, and this is what he had to say: “To begin with, the ‘letters and numbers’ are called indexes, and in the brief history of indexes, there were two basic sizes. The first size was fairly small; all a person had to do was to barely fan the cards to see the indexes. Because one only needed to give the cards a