Robert S. Lancaster here again.
As I said in my "Introcing RSLancaster (me)!" thread (in the "Introduce Yourself" section of the UC Forum), I have a collection of more than 2,000 decks of unusual playing cards - primarily deks with non-standard (custom) courts.
A couple of months ago, an onlne friend asked me when/how I had started such an unusual hobby.
People arealways surprised by it, and say they have never even heard of the hobby (it ain't exactly stamp collecting, is it?).
In response to my online friend I wrote the following, and thought I would share it with you all here at UC.
It's pretty long, but I hope to insert some scans of cards to make it more interesting.
-RSL
HOW I STARTED THIS ADDICTION - ER, COLLECTION
=====[ 1968 - MY FIRST DECK (AN INNOCENT ENOUGH BEGINNING) ]=====
In 1968 or 1969, when I was ten or eleven years old, my mother and I walked into a Hallmark Cards store in a local mall (we lived in Los Angeles County). She told me we could buy something for me as long as it was inexpensive (I think she said "less than a dollar"), so I started looking around for something that would catch my eye, and found a display of little boxes of decks of miniature playing cards. At the time, I enjoyed having kid-sized versions of things which I thought of as for adults, and these cards certainly fit the bill! Our family played lots of cards (mostly Rummy), and my siblings and I also played lots of Klondike Solitaire (we simply called it "Solitaire"), but the cards had aways been bit large for my (kid-sized) hands.
Back at the Hallmark Store: I looked at all of the boxes of miniature card decks, and they seemed to be just the right size for my hands! The boxes were all sealed, so I looked at the images on them, figuring that what was on them would also be on the back of the cards.
Most of the images were pretty boring (landscapes, flowrs, horses, etc.) until I found one which really caught my eye: it was drawing of Snoopy on his dog house, against a "psychedelic" background of orange and yellow! I loved Snoopy (who didn't?), and the "psychedelic" design was cool (or I guess I would have thought it was "groovy" - it was the 1960s!). I showed them to my mother, and she hesitantly approved the purchase (I believe they were all of 75 cents). We bought them and left the store.
I opened them when we got home, and was, at first, disappointed that the Jacks, Queens and Kings in the deck were not the ones I was used to seeing. No, they were portrayed by the Peanuts Characters Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown! The Jokers had Snoopy, wearing a jester's hat, juggling three balls and a dizzy Woodstock.
Even the Aces featured Snoopy again - dressed up as the World War I Flying Ace, of course!
Although initially disappointed that the deck was not just a kid-sized version of an adult's deck, I came to enjoy the deck and its unusual courts (we called them the "face cards" back then), jokers and aces. My friends and I played countless games of Rummy on the floor of my bedroom with that deck.
Eventually the deck, in its box, ended up in a dresser drawer where I kept small playthings I no longer used.
=====[ 1978 - MY SECOND DECK (THE ADDICTION GROWS) ]=====
I know the exact date I purchased the second deck in what later became my collection: December 16, 1978.
I remember the date because it was the day after I married my first wife (at the age of twenty).
We went to Disneyland the day after our wedding for a "honeymoon" of sorts.
As we walked down Main Street in the park, we passed a glass booth on the sidewalk in front of a store. The booth contained a mannequin dressed as a gypsy fortuneteller, and was seated with a crystal ball and a spread of playing cards which she was studying intently. If you put some coins into a slot, the mannequin started moving and a recording played, in which she told your fortune.
As we looked at the display, I suddenly noticed that the playing cards in front of the "gypsy" were unusual - The Jacks, Queens and Kings were portrayed by Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse and Mickey Mouse, and the Joker was Goofy (of course)!
Reminded of my Peanuts playing cards, I wondered if the deck was for sale somewhere in the park. We went into the store the glass case was in front of and, sure enough, the deck was sold there (with either a blue or red back). I purchased one and tossed it into the bag with our other souvenirs of the day.
The next day at home, I pulled the deck out of its box and examined the cards. I wanted to compare it with my Peanuts deck, so I pulled THAT out of its box (I still had it in a box containing some of my favorite childhood things (okay, so I'm a packrat).
As I compared the two decks I started to wonder: could there be other decks out there with unusual "face cards", perhaps depicting other cartoon characters? If so, wou8ldn't that be a cool thing to collect?
I mentioned this to my wife Cindy, and she said that she had seen some unusual face cards in decks she had seen during her frequent visits to antique stores and thrift stores. I hads gone to such stores with her a time or two and been bored out of my skull. But I asked her if I could go with her the next time she went, and thus started more than twenty years of her and I scouring antique stores/malls, with me opening and looking at every deck of cards they had for sale.
I soon found that there were MANY decks with unusual "face cards", and not just depicting cartoon characters!
Some showed portraits of famous people (royalty, politicians, actors, etc). Others depicted characters from literature (Shakespeare, Melville, Mother Goose, etc), advertising mascots (The Pep Boys, "Snap, Crackle and Pop", etc), and more! I bought all the ones I found.
The decks with advertising mascots made me wonder if any then-current companies were still producing such decks. This led to my stopping in at various stores and asking if they sold unusual decks of playing cards.
This usually got me strange looks from sales clerks, with confused responses like "No, this is a clothing store!" (with an implied "...you idiot!" at the end).
But every once in a while there would be a payoff. I asked at a Big Dog clothing store once, and the clerk said "No...wait! hold a sec, let me check something..." She went into the back and came out with a handful of decks of cards! "We just go these in last week, and didn't know where to put them. Afe they what you are looking for?
I opened one and - paydirt! The Jacks, Queens, Kings and Jokers were all portrayed by the chain's mascot, a large black-and-white, St. Bernardish dog!
Other times I would see a store which, while it did not have a mascot character, had a "theme" which I could easily see used to design an unusual card deck around. I would walk in and ask "Do you happen to sell any playing cards?". Again, probably 99 out of a hundred clerks would look at me as though I was insane for even asking, but that one out of a hundred made it all worthwhile!
Once, while strolling through a mall on my lunch hour, I saw a store which sold Afrocentric merchandise (African-styled clothing and such).
I immediately thought how cool it would be if there was a deck of playing cards where the face cards were black people!
I walked into the store and went to the clerk in the back, getting a few suspicious looks from other customers on the way (I was the only white person there).
The clerk also gave me a "what are YOU doing here?" Look.
A conversation went something like this:
Her: Can I help you with something?
Me: Yes. I was wondering if you sold any playing cards.
Her: Playing cards? No!! (again, the "...you idiot" was strongly implied)
Me: Oh, okay. I just thought you might have one where the face cards were black people.
Her: Oh, I see. OH, WAIT A SEC!!
(She rummaged around under the counter and came up with a handful of decks of cards. I opened one and - sure enough, the Jacks, Queens and Kings were not only black, but were dressed in African clothing!
Me: Yes, these are EXACTLY what I was looking for!
Her: We just got them in, and I didn't know where to display them...
I bought one. They were made by a company called Blacks Factor (a take-off on the company Max Factor).
The clerk was bemused, probably wondering why a white man was so jazzed to have found such a deck...
By this time it was around 1985. I only had about fifteen or twenty decks in my collection, but was confident there were many more out there - but, how to find them?
=====[ A NEW PLACE TO LOOK ]=====
By the mid 1990s, I was working as a contract computer programmer at Buena Vista Home Video, the video arm of the Disney Corporation.
It was a large (for the time)"cubicle farm" in a building in Burbank, California.
Not surprisingly, there was Disney-themed stuff on display everywhere there. Even some of the employees' cubicles displayed items from their personal collections of Disneyana. I mentioned my Disney deck to one of them who was an absolute nut about Disney (his entire home was decorated, floor to ceiling with his collection of Disneyana), and he urged me to bring in the deck to display it in my cubicle.
I didn't want to just pin or tape the cards up in my cube, so I found some plexiglass frames which were made to display Baseball cards - four to a frame.
I bought five of them.
I loaded four of them with the J,Q,K & A from the four suits in the Disney deck, and loaded the fifth with a Joker, a card Back, and two small printouts I had made of a wrieup I had done about the deck and my collection.
I brought these five frames to work the following Monday morning and hung them up in my cubicle.
Throughout theday, as people stopped into my cubicle to speak with me about this or that, they would comment on the cards, intrigued by my hobby. More often than not, after they left the cubicle they would later return, bringing another employee with them to see the cards. Soon, people I did not even know were stopping in just to see the cards they had heard about!
Throughout that week, many of the people who had seen the cards told me that they would like to see cards from other decks in my collection!
Be careful asking a collector to show you their collection - you just might get what you asked for!
That Friday I took the frames back home.
Over the weekend I chose another deck from my collection (I think it was the Blacks Factor deck), loaded up the frames from it, and took them to work the following Monday morning, where I hung them again in my cubicle. I also composed an email about the deck and sent it out to all of the people who had expressed an interest in seeing other cards from my collection.
By lunch, most of them had stopped by, looked at the cards and, often, came back with someone else to show the cards to! People really seemed to love looking at playing cards!
From then on, it became a regular start to every workweek: I brought in cards from another deck, put them in the frames, and sent out an email announcing "this week's deck". Often, within an hour of my sending the email, there would be a line of people standing outside my cubicle waiting to see the cards!
Someone said that it was almost like visiting an art gallery exhibit, and joked that I should get a velvet rope/cordon to keep the waiting line organized.
I started heading each Monday's announcement email "This week's exhibit at The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards" and would print out information about that week's "exhibit" and place it on an easel next to the frames. This went on for months!
Along about this time, I had been hearing about this new "Internet thing" and joined AOL so that I could take a look.
One of the first things I did on the internet was to search for information about playing cards, but all that was out there then was about PLAYING with playing cards, not COLLECTING them.
I did find eBay (back then it was called Auction Web), and got many unusual decks by winning auctions there.
After my contract at BVHV expired (I had been there more than three years at that point), and was sad that I no longer had a place to share some opf my collection with people.
Frustrated that I was finding no web sites for playing card collectors on the Internet, I decided to look into creating one myself! I had been a professional computer programmer for almost twenty years at that point, so I figured "how hard could it be?" and, with those famous last words, I dove into learning HTML, the only way at the time to create a web site. (This was before blogging and such had made it possible for a non-technical person to create web sites).
I caught on fairly quickly, and used the web space which came as part of my AOL account to create a display of cards from four of the decks from my collection (including the Disney deck and the Blacks Factor deck).
Since I wanted it to be much like what I had done with my cards at BVHV, I named the web site "The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards" too!
As I added more deck displays to the web site (initially, I tried to add at least one every month), I started getting email from others who also collected playing cards - I wasn't the only person with the hobby!!
Through some of these fellow collectors I learned about - and later joined - card collector clubs, such as 52+J (52 Plus Joker, a group focusing on decks published in America) and the IPCS (International Playing Card Society)
Through these organizations - and through my email contacts from my web site - I grew to find that there was faaar more to the hobby than I had imagined, and that there were card collectors all around the globe!
In 1997 I was invited to speak at the annual convention of 52+J, where I spoke on "How to Use the Internet in Collecting Playing Cards"
Few people present there had much experience on the Internet, and many were amazed when I brought up on my projection screen images of my site, eBay auctions of playing cards, a few sites where vendors sold collectible cards, and images of the web site I had just created for 52+J itself!
(I had sold the club's officers on my creating the site in a meeting where they asked me questions like "Do you really think this Internet is going to catch on?" and "Do you really think that people will use the Internet to find information about their hobbies?" (Remember, this was 1997)).
During the presentation, people in the audience Ooohed and Aaahed at the images of playing cards, and asked me lots and lots of questions as they started realizing that there was more to the Internet than they had thought, and that it might be of use to them!
There are many other stories I could tell about my card-collecting adventures, such as my touring playing card museums in Europe, my attempt to design a Transformation deck, a playing card I designed being on display in a museum in Vittoria, Spain, and much more, but I've blathered on far too long already, so I will end with this:
Collecting playing cards is a hobby rich in history and variety, and which has helped me to form lasting friendships with fellow collectors and vendors in countries all over the world.
NOTE:
All of the images in this post are from the archive.org copy of my old, now-defunct, web site.
They were all scanned using a mouse-like hand-held scanner (a painstaking process neccesary before flatbed scanners became affordable to me).
