Contest | Playing with A Full Deck – design your own playing card!

Playing with a Full Deck is a competition for the most creative re-imagining of the standard playing card deck. The competition accompanies the Columbia University Libraries’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library exhibition, Mirror of Humanity: Seeing Ourselves in Playing Cards. The Columbia University community is invited to create a new playing card design. The contest […]

Read More…

New exhibition | Mirror of Humanity: Seeing Ourselves in Playing Cards

Playing cards were once condemned as “the Devil’s picture book,” gaudy bits of pasteboard that encouraged sins such as time-wasting and gambling. Mirror of Humanity: Seeing Ourselves in Playing Cards instead approaches playing cards as mirrors which retain images of past perceptions of ourselves and others. Whether commercial products made to appeal to buyers, or […]

Read More…

A discussion of early dust wrappers on books on the SHARP discussion list took a side turn when wrappers on playing cards came up as a possibly parallel phenomenon. The recently-publicized Field collection of playing cards — over 6,000 decks and a good bit of related material — has a number of these wrappers. In […]

Read More…