Century of Progress
‘Century of Progress’ Exposition playing cards produced by Western Playing Card Company, USA, 1933.
Produced by Western Playing Card Company as a souvenir of the Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, each card has a different black-and-white photo scene of the fair, while the joker shows a gorilla of a million years ago. The reverse features a globe rotating on its orbit with the date 1933.
• See: Hochman encyclopedia of American playing cards, p. 251, SX26
Above: ‘Century of Progress’ playing cards produced by Western Playing Card Company, 1933.
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.
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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