Counting cards: NY collection includes 6,356 decks
The collection spans 50 countries and four centuries and touches on subjects ranging from beer marketing to 19th-century Portuguese politics.
Columbia University has a collection of playing cards that is among the world's largest, a trove of 6,356 decks that the Ivy League institution painstakingly catalogued this spring after they were donated to the school by an eccentric collector.
Ranging from simple woodblock prints from 1550s Austria to a 1963 American pack with admiring caricatures of the Kennedy family, the collection is not just a novelty, but a rich, if offbeat, resource for research. Scholars say cards can be useful records of social history, depicting how cultural touchstones, political figures and historical events were seen in their times.
"They're kind of wacky and different for us," said Columbia rare-book librarian Jane Rodgers Siegel, but "once you actually start looking at the cards, they're just fascinating."
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
Columbia University has a collection of playing cards that is among the world's largest, a trove of 6,356 decks that the Ivy League institution painstakingly catalogued this spring after they were donated to the school by an eccentric collector.
Ranging from simple woodblock prints from 1550s Austria to a 1963 American pack with admiring caricatures of the Kennedy family, the collection is not just a novelty, but a rich, if offbeat, resource for research. Scholars say cards can be useful records of social history, depicting how cultural touchstones, political figures and historical events were seen in their times.
"They're kind of wacky and different for us," said Columbia rare-book librarian Jane Rodgers Siegel, but "once you actually start looking at the cards, they're just fascinating."