Sports & Leisure - Overview
The nation's passion for sports is obvious every day—at NASCAR races, kiddie soccer matches, and countless other contests. From a handball used by Abraham Lincoln to Chris Evert's tennis racket to a baseball signed by Jackie Robinson, the roughly 6.000 objects in the Museum's sports collections bear witness to the vital place of sports in the nation's history. Paper sports objects in the collections, such as souvenir programs and baseball cards, number in the hundreds of thousands.
Leisure collections encompass a different range of objects, including camping vehicles and gear, video games, playing cards, sportswear, exercise equipment, and Currier and Ives prints of fishing, hunting, and horseracing. Some 4,000 toys dating from the colonial period to the present are a special strength of the collections.
"Sports & Leisure - Overview" showing 1 items.
Playing cards
- Description (Brief)
- A set of playing cards, probably made of celluloid, contained in an alligator-patterned two-part faux leather case. Pockets on either side of the case contain a game marker. The markers have celluloid discs that indicate "Trump," "Games," and "Points." The cards were manufactured by W. P. Co. of Racine, Wis. They picture an avenue lined with palm trees.
- W. P. Co. was the Western Printing Company, also known as the Western Printing and Lithograph Company, the name under which it was incorporated in 1910.
- The company did a variety of commercial printing from stationery and paper goods to games, puzzles, books, and comic books. It is best known as the publisher and printer of Little Golden Books in partnership with Simon and Schuster.
- date made
- 1939
- maker
- Western Publishing Co., Inc.
- ID Number
- 2006.0098.1472
- catalog number
- 2006.0098.1472
- accession number
- 2006.0098
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center