British Monarchs

Published March 09, 2024 • Updated March 09, 2024

Commemorating the royal wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer on the 29^th July 1981.

Published by B.P. Grimaud in 1981 as a commemorative edition to celebrate the royal wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer on the 29th July 1981. This luxurious pack depicts four royal palaces on the aces, and British monarchs ranging from Queen Elizabeth 1st (1533-1603) to Queen Elizabeth II (1926-[2022]) on the court cards. The jokers are Prince Charles and Diana. The cards are presented as gold-framed portraits, as if displaying works of art. The reverse side is printed with the royal coat-of-arms. A bilingual information sheet provides brief biographical information and details of the four palaces.

British Monarchs playing cards produced by B.P. Grimaud in 1981

Above: British Monarchs commemorative playing cards produced by B.P. Grimaud for the royal wedding, 1981.

• See the box

Reference

Fournier Museum, Playing cards II, France no. 594.

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By Peter Burnett

United Kingdom • 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.

• Russian Playing Cards

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.