Within the framework of material knowledge culture, a special form of popular canon cultivation since the 19th century is the literary picture quartet. Quartets exist with a wide variety of pictorial motifs, from car brands to world monuments. They essentially serve three media-performative functions, mustering a show and a play value plus a didactic purpose. Particularly in the German-speaking area, varying quartets with groups of four classical writers spread against this background, in the national and the international variant. The preconditions for the genesis of this genre of printed game objects were the rise of chromolithography on cardboard and the development of a growing awareness of national literature in the young Wilhelmine Empire, but also a broad discourse on world literature in the wake of Goethe’s term. Poets’ quartets convey or consolidate elementary literary knowledge through the combination of image and minimal text as well as optional further information, addressed to all age groups. In many cases, the focus of the cognitive activity is not on simplistic game, but on the reception of combined media information. The given parameters of literary-historical substructuring are important for canon building: four times eight means eight countries/language cultures or eight epochs on the one hand and a mostly male canon of four writers on the other hand. The mnemonic potential of symbolic numbers between 3 and 12 favors the constitution and diffusion of canons. This principle is illustrated by the homogeneous groupings of the literary quartets.