Radical playing cards
Radical playing cards, identifying radical characters from history, United Kingdom, 2021
Radical Tea Towel, based in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, began life manufacturing tea towels inspired by history’s great radical campaigns and heroes. The company now produces aprons, bags, calendars, etc., and this pack of playing cards – all intended for people with progressive values who want to give gifts that make you think, and who want to learn about where their rights and freedoms actually came from. See the box►
The pack identifies “larger-than-life” radical characters from history divided into four categories. Diamonds – writers and philosophers; clubs – orators and visionaries; hearts – activists and revolutionaries; spades – feminists and suffragettes. The jokers present words of wisdom from Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. There are two extra cards which list the names of all portrayed with their dates of birth and death.


Above: Radical playing cards designed by Tim Pearce and published by Radical Tea Towel, based in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, UK, 2021. Manufacturer not known.

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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