Cary Collection of Playing Cards
Encyclopedia
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...
of Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
in the USA, is one of the most significant assemblages of materials relating to playing card
Playing card
A playing card is a piece of specially prepared heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic, marked with distinguishing motifs and used as one of a set for playing card games...
s and related ephemera in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
.
Overview
The collection is comparable to card collections held by the United States Playing Card CompanyUnited States Playing Card Company
The United States Playing Card Company, started in 1867, produces and distributes many brands of playing cards, including Bicycle, Bee, Hoyle, Kem, and others, plus novelty and custom cards, and other playing card accessories such as poker chips. The company was once based in Cincinnati, Ohio, but...
, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Deutsches Spielkarten Museum, and the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
. The collection lays claim to more than 2600 packs of cards, 460 sheets of uncut card papers, and 150 wood blocks for printing cards.
Included in the collection are cards from all over the world, including Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
, and Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
. In addition to the card collections themselves, other ephemera related to the act of playing card games also belong to the collection, including various rulebooks and a variety of gaming counters. The true value of the collection lies in the wisdom of its principal collector, who desired to amass a collection that reflected in some depth both standard and non-standard cards. As a result, the Cary Collection has close to, if not the, greatest variety of both types of cards.
History of the collection
Although the card collection is named after Melbert B. Cary, Jr.Melbert Cary
Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Jr. was a graphic artist who imported numerous typefaces from Europe. He married Mary Flagler Cary, an heiress of one of the founders of Standard Oil...
, a wealthy importer, the collection actually began in 1945 with the donation of a sizeable amount of cards and books from Mrs Samuel H. Fisher. Her donations were significant, spanning approximately five hundred years of the history of the playing card and reaching as far back as the 15th century. Despite Mrs Fisher's initial donation, the collection did not gain its current reputation as a premier collection until the late 1960s when Cary's widow, Mary Flagler Cary
Mary Flagler Cary
Mary Flagler Cary was heir to part of the Standard Oil fortune and became a notable philanthropist, mainly through the charitable trust established at her death...
, donated the couple's collection to Yale. Since then, the collection has continued to grow due to a generous bequest that accompanied the Cary's donation and that stipulates that the money can only be used for the purchase of playing cards and related materials.
Tarot and fortune telling cards
The Cary Collection is not merely composed of standard playing cards, but also contains tarot cards as well as cards related to cartomancyCartomancy
Cartomancy is fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Forms of cartomancy appeared soon after playing cards were first introduced into Europe in the 14th century...
, or the divination of one's fortune based upon interpretation of various cards. The Beinecke Library guards two of the earliest still-existing tarot
Tarot
The tarot |trionfi]] and later as tarocchi, tarock, and others) is a pack of cards , used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play a group of card games such as Italian tarocchini and French tarot...
decks in the world, the Visconti
House of Visconti
Visconti is the family name of two important Italian noble dynasties of the Middle Ages. There are two distinct Visconti families: The first one in the Republic of Pisa in the mid twelfth century who achieved prominence first in Pisa, then in Sardinia where they became rulers of Gallura...
and the Este tarot cards. Of the two, the Visconti cards are probably the most well-known. These cards were commissioned by the Visconti family in the mid-15th century and may be the oldest tarot card deck still in existence.
The Visconti and Este tarot cards are not the only such cards in the Cary Collection. There are also French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
suited animal tarots from Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
and some Marseilles type tarots. Also included are non-tarot cartomantic decks. In 2006, the Beinecke acquired a pack of cards that were enclosed in every packet of Black Cat Virginia cigarettes, and in 2007 a deck of seventy-eight photographic tarot cards was added to the collection.