MANHATTAN
Columbia archive adds trove of playing cards
NEW YORK (AP) — 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 cataloged 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.
“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.”
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.
For Field, of Queens, cards were part of a ravenous appetite for collecting that extended to transit tokens and bus transfers, said Frank Hunter, a longtime friend and partner in Field’s work as an authenticator of Dali’s prints.
