Fairchild came out with “Cities” in 1945. Each city formed a three card set, which players competed, no doubt hotly, to complete. The cities were all in the U.S., and each was worth a different number of points: New York City (12), Chicago (11), Philadelphia (10), Detroit (9), Los Angeles (8), Baltimore (7), Cleveland (6), […]

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I recently picked up a packet of bawdy ephemera in an antique store: flyers, pamphlets, booklets, and sheets of sexual and scatological jokes and verses, all apparently from the 1930s. Eleven of them were published by the Swan Publishing Co., in Elizabeth City, N. C. An internet search turned up nothing about it. However, one […]

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“Frank Buck’s Bring ‘Em Back Alive Game” was published by Fairchild in 1937. Frank Buck had a long career as an animal collector, with ancillary forays into writing and acting. He collected animals for circuses and zoos, his motto being “bring ’em back alive.” This deck has striking illustrations of animals, to be collected in […]

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The Blaireau Affair is now available from Black Scat Books! Alphonse Allais’s only novel, first published in 1899, has never been out of print in France, and has inspired four movies. It’s summer in the provinces, and Blaireau, the local poacher, is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. There are futile political squabbles, a […]

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