Trial and Error
Trial and Error produced by Lance Whitehouse, Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, 2015
Lance Whitehouse, Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, produced in 2015 a special custom pack of playing cards for two charities: the Old Bailey’s Sheriffs’ & Recorder’s Fund which gives small grants to ex-prisoners and their families in London, and the PAN Intercultural Arts organisation which empowers disadvantaged young people in projects which prevent youth offending. The court cards and aces feature famous Old Bailey (i.e. the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) characters both real and fictional from both sides of the bar. Real characters include Judge Jeffreys, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Fry, William Penn. Fictional characters include: Lady Chatterley, Fagin, Bill Sykes, and Suky Tawdry from the Beggars’ Opera. The 4 jokers provide information about the two charities. A second pack entitled Even More Trial and Error was published in 2016.
Above: “Trial and Error” produced by Lance Whitehouse, Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, 2015.
By Peter Burnett
United Kingdom • Member since July 27, 2022 • Contact
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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