Thousand-year history
Undeniably the most popular games throughout history have been played with playing cards. With a thousand-year history, and six centuries of use in Europe, these little pieces of stiff paper merit particular attention, having much to tell about industrial development and changing tastes through the ages. They have also been a medium for painters to express their skill and imagination. Museums have been dedicated to collecting and researching playing cards throughout the world – in Paris, Altenburg, Vitoria, Turnhout and New Haven – as public collections or sponsored by casinos and card manufacturers.
Cards and games
There is a strict distinction to be made between these two concepts. Each has spawned enough literature to fill a library. Cards – particularly those made in the 16th to 19th centuries – are craft products often aspiring to works of art. They are now highly prized objects both in museums and in the art trade. Games are as old as the cards. Many of them, and the peculiarities of their adherents, have always made them objects of prejudice. Card-players often find themselves cast to the periphery of society. But card games, apart from the opportunity they afford for acquiring (and losing) a fortune, are social entertainment that could rank as an intellectual sport.
Beautiful Tarot
It was when I discovered Tarot that my interest in cards began. I was entranced by their colourfulness and beauty. “Ordinary” people are familiar with playing cards, fortune-telling cards and Hungarian cards. They come across these every day. But the “crazed collector” finds out that every people on earth had created its own games and the beautiful historical, mythological, literary, musical, local-historical or even erotic motifs have been produced for them. The trouble starts when he wants to have all these for himself! Very soon, he will realise that he needs to focus on a theme, that is, specialisation is unavoidable. I have chosen to collect Hungarian, Austrian and East European cards. Building up a basic collection and the literature about them has put a heavy burden on the family budget. And it remains so, because membership fees, postal and travel expenses, buying books and developing a collection are not tailored to the income of a person from Central Europe. Beautiful and informative books carry price tags of up to $200, and real rarities fetch thousands. |
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