Vintage Playing Cards

W H Smith & Son, England.

Have had these for a very long time :-)

W H Smith plc (known colloquially as Smith's) is a British retailer, best known for its chain of high street, railway station, airport, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers and entertainment products. Its headquarters are in Swindon, Wiltshire. Smith's is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. It was the first chain store company in the world, and was responsible for the creation of the ISBN book catalogue system.
Wikipedia

The First WH Smith Railway Bookstall
Seeing the potential of the new technology, William Henry Smith opened his first railway bookstall on November 1st, 1848.

The first William Henry Smith was born in 1792 just two weeks before the sudden death of his father Henry Walton Smith, who only a few months earlier had established a small ‘newswalk’ or newspaper round in Berkeley Square, London. The young Smith remained in the news trade, opening a reading room in the Strand in 1821. ‘First with the news’ was his proud boast, as he created a country-wide newspaper distribution network based on the mail-coach system.

His son, William Henry II (1825-91), who became a partner in the family business in 1846 at the peak of ‘railway mania’, saw the potential of the new technology more quickly than his father. Railways offered a faster and more reliable way of sending newspapers to the farthest corners of the country...By 1860 Smith’s bookstalls were to be seen on all main lines and many secondary ones. It was a cultural revolution, as well as a commercial one...In 1905, when the rental contracts for the 2,000 Great Western and London and North Western Railways stations were up for renewal, the business was faced with steep rent increases. The company responded by opening 150 new shops in the streets leading to the stations instead, each one fitted out in the recognisable company style. The decision meant that, when some sixty years later the railway network was slashed back by Dr Beeching, WH Smith & Son was secure.
www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/first-wh-smith-rai...

24/31 January Dark Green, 365 Days in Colour