NEW YORK — 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 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 isn’t 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.”
The collection is a significant addition to playing-card repositories held by libraries, museums and other institutions around the world. London’s Guildhall Library has a similar-sized collection, said curator John Fisher. Some other institutions boast as many as 10,000 decks, according to the International Playing-Cards Society, a group of collectors and enthusiasts.
The earliest European references to playing cards date to the 1300s, though a domino-like form emerged earlier in China.
Besides fueling countless parlor games and wagers, cards have served as souvenirs, erotica, satire, fortunetelling tools, advertising for everything from airlines to suspenders, and educational primers.
Columbia’s collection was the result of a bequest from a man almost as colorful as his cards: schoolteacher, author, mountain climber, nudist and Salvador Dali archivist Albert Field, who died in 2003.
