History of Literature

Sets, long before the game (1700s, France)

Collecting cards in sets is far older than Literature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps a French pack from the 1700s printed “for quartets”: games of gathering cards into families.

Europe, from a French pack for quartets, 1700s. The Met, CC0.

Written record

Dr. Busby (1843, Salem, Massachusetts)

In 1843 Anne W. Abbott, a clergyman’s daughter from Beverly, Massachusetts, took a card game to a publisher in Salem. She called it Dr. Busby. It sold so well that a whole family of asking-for-cards games grew from it.

“From the game of Dr. Busby have sprung a great number of social card games.” Milton Bradley, 1872.

Written record

Happy Families (1850s, London)

In London, John Jaques and Son printed Happy Families: Mr Bones the Butcher, Mrs Pots the Painter’s Wife and their families. The firm later said that Sir John Tenniel of Punch drew them, years before his pictures for Alice in Wonderland.

You ask a player for one member of a family. If they have it, you ask again. If not, the turn passes to the player you asked. Literature’s turn still works this way.

In 1941 a bomb destroyed the Jaques factory. One card, Master Potts the Painter’s son, was found in a fallen safe.

Happy Families, a Jaques edition of the 1880s. Public domain.

Story told

Authors (1861, Salem, Massachusetts)

Back in Salem, a young man and his friends copied Dr. Busby’s way of play into a game of famous writers and their books. They called it Authors. Its rules already held Literature’s most important one.

Literature may take its name from Authors. Pagat, the main rules site, thinks it possible. No one knows.

The Game of Authors, Parker Brothers, 1890s. Public domain.

“A player may not call for a card of a set when he does not hold at least one card of that author.” Authors, Parker Brothers rules.

Written record

The oldest memory (1940s, Madras and Kerala)

The oldest memory of Literature itself comes from southern India. Sat Balaa of Chennai told pagat.com that their mother and aunt played it in Madras in the 1940s with their father, a doctor in the army of the British Raj. Another family thinks it may go back to Kerala in the 1930s.

Later players remember it in college hostels: Thrissur in the 1980s, and Madurai and Erode. Today pagat.com calls the game “probably invented in southern India”. In 2006 it thought Canada.

“A military doctor (Subedhar Rank) during the British Raj era and an avid player of this game.” Sat Balaa, Chennai, to pagat.com.

Remembered

Canadian Fish (1950s to 2002, New York and Toronto)

Ali Salahuddin’s father grew up in Kerala in the 1930s and played the game at Columbia University in the 1950s. In the 1990s Ali Salahuddin taught it to graduate maths students at the University of Toronto. Pagat thinks this is how it reached North America, and why many there call it Canadian Fish.

In 2002 Mike Develin wrote down its rules, with one only a Canadian game could have.

“By convention, the eldest Canadian at the table goes first.” Mike Develin, 2002.

Remembered

The ninth set (2016, Everywhere)

Which cards to take out was never settled. Wikipedia’s first rules, in 2005, dropped the 2s. Pagat’s first, in 2006, dropped the 7s. From 2007 it dropped the 8s, leaving 48 cards in eight sets, and a game could end 4 to 4.

Players fixed the tie by putting the 8s back with both jokers as a ninth set. Pagat first lists it in 2016 or 2017. Carleton’s Fish Club, Litaf in India and this site all play nine sets, so one team always claims five.

Written record

Every campus thinks it is theirs (2018, Campuses)

Bryn Mawr’s maths club calls Fish “a time-honored tradition”: “All you need are six willing participants (victims?) and a standard deck of cards.” A Cornell paper said in 2018 that a Cornell student had invented it.

When COVID sent students home in 2020, an MIT student built it online: “Fish was a defining part of our experiences on campus.” In 2026, fans tried to write BITS Pilani into its Wikipedia page.

Written record

Machines at the table (Today, Online)

From one seat, the 45 cards you cannot see can lie in about 1.9 × 10²⁸ ways. Hobby bots have tried to read them since 2017. We know of no research paper on the game.

The bots here keep their own rules for sure moves, and use Monet, from the FishAI project, to choose a guess.

Written record

Sources

• Pagat: Literature: https://www.pagat.com/quartet/literature.html
• Pagat in 2006 and 2007 (Wayback Machine): http://web.archive.org/web/20070915021901/http://www.pagat.com/quartet/literature.html
• Stewart Culin, Journal of American Folklore, 1893: https://archive.org/details/jstor-533009
• Milton Bradley, Work and Play, 1872: https://archive.org/details/workplayannualof00milt
• Jaques Happy Families, The World of Playing Cards: https://www.wopc.co.uk/games/jaques-happy-families
• Mike Develin, The Ten Best Card Games You’ve Never Heard Of, 2002: http://web.archive.org/web/20020821185826/http://www.bantha.org:80/~develin/cardgames.html
• Wikipedia: Literature (card game), first version, 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=21049875
• Bryn Mawr Math Club: the rules of Fish: https://www.brynmawr.edu/math/rules-fish
• The Cornell Daily Sun, 8 March 2018: https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2018/03/graces-grove-a-new-card-game-fish
• Fish online, built at MIT in 2020: https://github.com/amy-lei/fish
• Carleton College Fish Club: http://web.archive.org/web/20260428023351/https://hhfinals.dgah.sites.carleton.edu/carlclubs/items/show/3101
• FishLab and its survey of Fish research: https://github.com/dylann4500/FishLab
• FishAI and its Monet bot, by Allen Hsieh (MIT licence): https://github.com/MeagerPotato/FishAI