Dick’s Games of Patience or Solitaire with Cards by William B. Dick - 1884: New Edition, Revised, and Enlarged Containing Sixty-four Games

With black border and debossed decorative designs on the hardbound cover and spine, and with title in gold gilt both on the spine and cover, there is also a jester in gold gilt standing on a black cub to the cover. All are bright with no rubbing. Brown cloth boards have numerous areas of wear: the top and bottom of the back strip (missing at the top), slight along the gutters front and rear and along the bottom and front edge of the boards, including all corners which also have bumping. Spine is straight with no cracking at the endpapers. The overall text block is solid with all pages firmly attached. Age tanning throughout. There is a previous owner name stamped to the title page. Otherwise, all interior pages are clean with no tears, cracks, or other previous owner marks. Fully illustrated with fifty explanatory tableaux. 154 pages plus six pages of book advertisements.

Patience or Solitaire is a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order, most intended for play by a single player. "Patience" is the earliest recorded name for this type of game; the word is French in origin with games being "regarded as an exercise in patience." While there are many theories on the origins of the game, there are some origin stories that claim it was invented by a French aristocrat during his imprisonment in the Bastille which would date it back to the first half of the 17th century, to the time of King Louis XIV.

Dick & Fitzgerald were a 19th-centry publisher based in New York. William Brisbane Dick (1827 – 1901) and Lawrence R. Fitzgerald (1826 – 1881) were publisher of books on subjects such as baseball, card games, card tricks, dream interpretation, divination, dowsing, ballroom dancing and amusement with this book being one of the earliest about the game. Eric Lott (American cultural historian) cites them as one of the leading publishers of circa 1850 songbooks (typically just lyrics and melodies) of the popular (now inappropriate) minstrel songs of the time, which he characterizes as "little lyric volumes of mass-produced caricature."