Folio Society Clare Mackie playing cards
Folio Society Clare Mackie playing cards with playful and charming designs.
Clare Mackie is an accomplished and well-established illustrator. Her work has appeared in prestigious magazines such as Tatler and the New Yorker, she has illustrated over 20 books, and her portfolio includes illustrations for adverts, greeting cards, magazines, kitchenware and stationery.
In 2009 the Folio Society published The Folio Book of Card Games, a book that featured Mackie’s artwork. This pack, published the following year in 2010, was originally given away in connection with that publication. Both the book and the playing cards feature her playful and very charming designs created exclusively for the Folio Society. See the box►
The pip cards, though elegantly designed, are standard, while the court cards and jokers present Mackie’s colourful and whimsical designs. The cards were published both as a twin set, with green and red backs, and also as a single pack.
Above: Folio Society Clare Mackie playing cards, United Kingdom, 2010.
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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