The Field Master List, available upon request, offers a reliable record of the full contents of the collection.
This collection is located onsite.
The Albert Field Collection of Playing Cards contains more than 6300 individual decks of playing cards as well as extensive ephemera and a library of reference books. The decks, ranging from the 16th through the 20th centuries, and across the world, are a rich vein of primary source material in popular imagery, costume, advertising, propaganda, as well as elite culture. Holdings are especially strong from early modern England, revolutionary France, the early American Republic, across a broad range of nineteenth-century national styles, and especially in transformation cards.
The Field Master List, available upon request, offers a reliable record of the full contents of the collection.
You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.
This collection is located onsite.
A selection of nearly 200 decks were digitized in 2018 and can be seen here: https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/field_playing_cards
Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
George Albert Field, Jr. (November 8, 1916 in Maplewood, NJ; died August 4, 2003 in Queens, NY) – or "Cap" to his friends – received his A.B. in English from Columbia College, and an A.M. from Harvard. He made his career teaching English, science, and mathematics at Columbia Preparatory School and in New York City public schools, but he is better known as one of the foremost authenticators of the works of Salvador Dali. Field began to collect playing cards in earnest following the Second World War, receiving advice and encouragement from noted collectors William Penn and Sylvia Mann. After Penn's death in 1966, Field and Mann agreed to purchase and divide Penn's collection in order to preserve its provenance and to supplement their own collections. For the remainder of his life, Field continued to acquire decks in frequent travels to Europe and across the United States, and he developed a thorough, cross-referenced cataloging system to organize his collection.
The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.
All links open new windows.
| Genre/Form | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ephemera (general object genre) | CLIO Catalog | ArchiveGRID |
| Subject | ||
| Playing cards | CLIO Catalog | ArchiveGRID |