House of cards / 1952

Six decades old and still available.  I recently bought a MoMA picture deck from a shopping channel at a remarkably low price.  Charles and Ray Eames designed two decks in 1952: a pattern and picture deck, both had fifty-four cards.  The pattern version seems to have fallen out of favor in recent times, though I bought a mixed deck in the early sixties (twenty-five pattern and twenty-eight pictures plus one title card). 

    The book Eames design (the best title I've read about the design duo and still available, check out Amazon) had some pages devoted to the cards and two fold-out pages that displayed them all (below).  The picture deck featured “familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms”. 

    Tigrett Enterprises, in Chicago, originally handled the distribution and marketing, the MoMA set I bought was made by the German company Ravensburger.   In 1960 Swissair issued some cards for children to play with on their flights, you can see them in the September 2011 archive. 

 

 

The leaflet that came with the pack I bought in the early sixties.