I have two playing-card-related research projects currently under way. Wellll..... I say research. I really mean Indiana Jones style searches for lost artifacts. A research project is making different kinds of inks; I'm searching for playing cards that haven't been seen in decades.
The first project is a search for the Krech Playing Cards. This partial deck is comprised of two, uncut but damaged, sheets of woodcut cards in a German style. A note written on one of the sheets estimates the cards are from 1440. Literally, it says "CA 1440" in a modern hand. These cards were in the collection of Mr. Alvin William Krech sometime before 1934. To the best of my knowledge these cards have not been seen by the general public since.
If you read my blog you know these cards. Jorge Kelman made an astounding reproduction deck based on these cards. You can tell I really like these cards and his work. Which is part of the reason I set out to find them.
Mr. Alvin W. Krech was a railroad man and a banker in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He was interested in the history of printing and was, at the time, a noted collector of early printed books. Books printed before the advent of movable-type are called incunabula. He had a number of these and, apparently, these two sheets of cards. He died in 1928 and, so far as I can tell, the collection was distributed to several members of his family.
The family began liquidating his collection in 1936 with the sale of two leaves of a Catholicon he owned. Some of the incunabula seem to have been sold off in 1948 but the playing cards were apparently not sold at that time. In 1969 Mr. Shepard Krech died and the last remaining portion of the collection I've been able to locate, an unknown number of books illustrated by George Cruikshank, apparently went to Yale University as a bequest or as a purchase.
I have been running down leads on these cards and have found a number of places the cards might have gone to. My job has mostly been to eliminate these leads. Believe it or not, finding the cards have not been sold at auction is actually a good thing. If the cards had sold at auction it would be very difficult to determine who bought the cards. As it stands, every lead I eliminate increases the odds that the cards are still with the family. That said, I don't think the family has the cards anymore. I've been in touch with them and they're going to look around, but I think the cards were either sold or donated or, God forbid, lost.
The second search should be a lot easier. The Mamluk Playing Cards in the holdings of the Topkapi Museum were last documented around 1972 when Cartamundi published a re-creation of the deck. I have been trying to determine the location and condition of these cards, and possibly obtain some new photos of them. Despite the fact that these cards are located in a world famous museum they are actually proving more difficult to locate. The Topkapi Sayrai Museum is actually three museums and all three are controlled by government agencies. Sort of like the Library of Congress in the United States. Sort of. The cards don't appear in the online catalog (I think. I don't claim any skill at all with Turkish) and haven't been on display in the past five years, that I have been able to determine. That means I can't refer to the cards by a catalog number.
Worse, without establishing researcher credentials with the appropriate government agency the folks at the Topkapi won't talk to me. So I've got no way to determine if the cards even exist at the moment. Right now my challenge is to get someone at the Topkapi to talk to me. Numerous attempts to contact people by e-mail have failed. I'm in receipt of the standard form they send out to people to establish research credentials but that form is skewed towards archaeology and they assume you will be visiting the country in person so they want passport information. I haven't had a passport in years. So I'm getting one so I can fill out a form so someone will, hopefully, talk to me about the world famous playing cards that don't appear in the museum's catalog and aren't on display.
Sigh.
