Maine Souvenir playing cards
Maine the Pine Tree State souvenir playing cards, 1900.
This 54 card pack, with 1 Joker and a descriptive card, was published by Chisholm Brothers, Portland, Maine in 1900. It appears as S32 in the Hochman Encyclopedia of American playing cards. The reverse shows Maine’s State House in Augusta within in a gold-bordered rectangular frame, with the State Seal emblazoned in each of the upper corners. The frame is surrounded by pine boughs and pine cones – the State floral emblem. The cards show places of interest in the State in oval frames where the oval border is the same colour as the background of each scene. Each suit is printed against a different background colour. See the extra card►
Above: Maine the Pine Tree State souvenir playing cards published by Chisholm Brothers, 1900.
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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