Golf playing cards
Golf playing cards published by Marks & Spencer, UK.
This is one of several undated packs published and sold by Marks & Spencer (a major British retailer founded in 1884). Each of the 52 cards displays one of the major golf courses in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Below each photograph there is a brief description of the course together with both the web address and contact telephone number. There are two jokers and an extra card which provides a link to the source of information►
Above: Golf playing cards sold by Marks & Spencer, UK. Undated.
See the box
Note from Roddy Somerville
A different edition of the pack has exactly the same faces throughout but a different (starburst) back design, and the box is also different . I'm afraid I don't know the date of either version or which came first. Both packs have a price sticker of £2.50 so they can't have been produced too many years apart. Maybe it was a sneaky bit of marketing to make you think you were buying a new, different pack when in fact the contents were identical (apart from the back design) - R.S
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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