Description
Playing Cards in Photographs Book
From the ridiculous to the sublime – and everything in between – this book showcases hundreds of historic, funny, fun, and fascinating appearances of the lowly playing card in a range of fascinating vintage and contemporary photographs. They appear in games worldwide, of course. But take a moment to minutely examine a subject, as author and collector Laurence Lubliner has in this book, and you’ll uncover the most unusual things. In Playing Cards in Photographs, Lubliner visually chronicles the countless unusual situations and settings in which cards have appeared over the last 150 years. Here, we see them on troop transport ships, in museums and store windows, on the sides of airplanes, in the hands of magicians, in the form of gigantic yet fragile pasteboard structures, on costumes, passed under tables by gamblers, in store windows – and virtually everywhere else. The book is a visual feast for collectors, photographers, designers, card aficionados, magicians, history buffs, and lovers of the odd & unusual. 96 pages in giant 11 x 11″ hardcover, with over 100 vintage photographs, text printed in two colors.
Review
The new book Playing Cards in Photographs, by antique dealer Laurence H. Lubliner, edited in part by Gabe Fajuri and published by Squash Publishing, came as a delightful surprise. From its title and ad copy I expected a nice collection of vintage photos depicting folks playing cards. I did not expect such fascinating accompanying text or such richness in detail in the photos themselves. I learned a lot about about playing card history, playing card manufacturers, card games, card costumes, cards in twentieth-century wars, and photography itself. Games depicted include Faro, Texas Holdem, Seven-Card Stud, Draw Poker, Euchre, Cribbage, Skat, Uta-Garuta, Seven Up, Solitaire, Concentration, and Tripoli, among others. Playing these games were families, moonshiners, hobos, children, cheaters, blind strikers, sighted strikers, street gangs, a Dutch soccer team, lesbians, a fortune teller, the physically handicapped, a dog, Asian women, five naked guys, magicians, soldiers, sailors, POWs, woodsmen, and guys in gas masks. Many others dressed up in card costumes. Celebrities with pasteboards included Doyle Brunson, Rocky Marciano, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Brian Berg (champion card stacker), Ronald Colman, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyk (lovers of cards should be huge fans of her movie The Lady Eve), and magicians Dante and Dai Vernon with Johnny Paul. As the above suggests, there is plenty to delight both the eye and the mind of anyone interested in cards. I grew up around cards–my grandmothers and great aunts all played and hosted card parties while the men played at fraternal organizations–yet I have almost no photos of my relatives in action. It’s nice to see that other card games were not so undocumented. This is a big square hardback book–imagine a record album, if you remember them– of 92 pages on glossy stock. Text in black provides background information on card history, while text in red provides entertaining commentary on the individual photos. All in all a grand project, and I hope Mr. Lubliner comes across enough new photos for a second volume. –Little Egypt Gazette
