Rare Book School's Author Card Games Collection on Display For First Time
Box cover of a 19th century authors card game (Parker Brothers, 1896) from the RBS teaching collections
Rare Book School's new exhibition Famous and Forgotten: The Game of Authors will look at the history of changing literary trends via its huge collection of author card games.
The Game of Authors was a educational game about collecting sets of cards of books by certain authors along the lines of Happy Families. First published in 1861, it was played by up to five players and was regularly updated as well as inspiring numerous spin-offs and variants. Curated by rare book specialists Barbara Heritage and Zoe Langer, the exhibition will put the School’s games on public display for the first time, featuring nearly 100 original decks dating from the mid-19th century to the present, offering a new angle on popular readership as it reflects the literary reputations of once-famous writers and the bookish interests of past readers.
The exhibition also includes printed books, ephemera, and curiosities from RBS’s collection. The east side of the exhibition gallery features famous authors who continue to be household names (Dante Alighieri, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain), while the west side focuses on the story of writers well known during their lifetimes but who are no longer seen as literary celebrities such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Lytton, Luise Mühlbach, Robert Southey, and Lew Wallace.
The exhibition also tells the story of how the game changed to incorporate authors such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Virginia Woolf.
Exhibition highlights include:
- a possible Mark Twain forgery
- a trio of rare 17th century Dante editions
- a poison book
- uncorrected proofs of works by James Baldwin
- rare translations and wartime editions of Jane Eyre
- Shakespeare-related items including a first edition of Langston Hughes’ Shakespeare in Harlem
Running through November 12 at on the second floor of the University of Virginia's Edgar Shannon Library., a day of special events, including exhibition tours and film screenings, will be held on September 12.
