Pride playing cards
Pride playing cards designed by Phil Constantinesco
This pack was published in 2022 by Smith Street Gifts, an independent publishing company based in Melbourne, Australia. From the website this pack is “a celebration of LGBTQ+ activists, artists, comedians, writers, musicians and pop cultural giants who have shaped our worlds, expanded our horizons and radically increased queer visibility. This deck is a standard poker set, with the four classic suits and 52 of the world’s greatest queer icons”. The two jokers feature the Babadook – “a queer icon since 2014” (for an explanation see here►). The cards were designed by Phil Constantinesco, a freelance illustrator and motion designer based in Brussels, Belgium.
Above: Pride playing cards designed by Phil Constantinesco, published in 2022 by Smith Street Gifts, Melbourne, Australia.
By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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