Poker with a 60-card deck

[Siegmund]

I am not sure what forum is best to ask this in, but I came across an odd historical tidbit last night.

Among the books in my collection is one of those "Hoyle's Rules of Games" type books from 1924. (I drag it out this time of year each year, because I run an annual Auction Bridge game (the predecessor of modern Contract Bridge) late each July in conjuction with a local pioneer-days festival.)

This year I happened to look up the rules for poker.

The description of each game starts out with the usual details: how many decks, how many players, are the cards ranked in the usual order, and so on.

In that first paragraph of the poker section it says this: "Rank of cards. A(high), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, A (low). When a 60-card deck is used, 11s rank above 10s, and 12s rank above 11s."

Was poker with a 60-card deck really so common in the 1920s that it merited mention in the very first paragraph of a description of how the game is played? (By contrast, several pages later, after it goes through the standard 5-card draw and 5-card stud rules and moves on to exotic variations like deuces wild or treating a blaze as beating two pair, it briefly mentions a variant of playing with a deck with the 5s 4s and 3s removed is "sometimes done to throw off the scientifically minded players by making flushes much harder to make". )

Any card historians care to comment?