Tarot and Fortune Telling Cards
The Cary Collection is not merely composed of standard playing cards, but also contains tarot cards as well as cards related to cartomancy, or the divination of one's fortune based upon interpretation of various cards. The Beinecke Library guards two of the earliest still-existing tarot decks in the world, the Visconti and the Este tarot cards. Of the two, the Visconti cards are probably the most well-known. These cards were commissioned by the Visconti family in the mid-15th century and may be the oldest tarot card deck still in existence.
The Visconti and Este tarot cards are not the only such cards in the Cary Collection. There are also French suited animal tarots from Belgium and some Marseilles type tarots. Also included are non-tarot cartomantic decks. In 2006, the Beinecke acquired a pack of cards that were enclosed in every packet of Black Cat Virginia cigarettes, and in 2007 a deck of seventy-eight photographic tarot cards was added to the collection.
Read more about this topic: Cary Collection Of Playing Cards
Famous quotes containing the words fortune, telling and/or cards:
“In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“Harvey: Oh, you kids these days, I’m telling you. You think the only relationship a man and a woman can have is a romantic one.
Gil: That sure is what we think. You got something better?
Harvey: Oh, romance is very nice. A good thing for youngsters like you, but Helene and I have found something we think is more appropriate to our stage of life—companionship.
Gil: Companionship? I’ve got a flea-bitten old hound at home who’ll give me that.”
—Tom Waldman (d. 1985)
“Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticated story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)