Fame Isn’t Forever: 160-Year-Old Card Game Uncovers History of Changing Literary Trends
RBS to Open New Exhibition This Summer
Life is sometimes likened to a game of cards: luck can change, forcing us to play the hand we’re dealt. But, as a new exhibition reveals, one historic card game can be a mirror of life, reflecting the literary reputations of once-famous writers and the bookish interests of past readers.
This fall, Rare Book School will open a new exhibition, Famous and Forgotten: The Game of Authors, on the second floor of UVA’s Edgar Shannon Library. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday 12 September at 5:00 p.m., with additional activities earlier in the day [see the complete schedule]. All exhibition-related events, including the reception, are free and open to the public.
Curated by rare book specialists Barbara Heritage and Zoe Langer, the show features the School’s vast collection of Authors card games, which will be on public display for the first time. The exhibition includes nearly 100 original card decks dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and offers a new angle on popular readership that cannot be recovered through traditional literary studies.
Displaying more than 200 objects pertaining to writers featured in the game, the show includes printed books, ephemera, and curiosities that have been drawn from RBS’s acclaimed teaching collection. One side of the exhibition gallery features famous authors who remain household names to this day; the other side tells the story of writers lauded during their lifetimes but who are no longer recognized as literary celebrities. Writers once popularly read—such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Lytton, Luise Mühlbach, Robert Southey, and Lew Wallace—are contrasted with major figures who still appear in today’s author cards, including Dante Alighieri, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. 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 seventeenth-century Dante editions, a poison book, uncorrected proofs of works by James Baldwin, rare translations and wartime editions of Jane Eyre, and Shakespeare-related items, such as a program from a reputedly haunted production of Hamlet (starring Daniel Day-Lewis) as well as a first edition of Langston Hughes’ Shakespeare in Harlem.
Free and open to the public through early November 2025, the exhibition will feature tours led by Heritage and Langer, who will share behind-the-scenes stories about the show and its artifacts. Heritage is RBS’s Miranker Family Director of Collections, Exhibitions & Scholarly Initiatives, while Langer is the School’s Associate Curator.