Famous & Forgotten: The Game of Authors

Life is sometimes likened to a game of cards: luck can change, forcing us to play the hand we’re dealt. But, as this exhibition revealed 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.

Famous and Forgotten: The Game of Authors featured the School’s vast collection of authors card games, on public display for the first time. The exhibition included nearly 100 original card decks dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and offered 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 included printed books, ephemera, and curiosities drawn from RBS’s acclaimed teaching collection. One side of the exhibition gallery featured famous authors who remain household names to this day; the other side told 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—were 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 told the story of how the game changed to incorporate authors such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Virginia Woolf.

Exhibition highlights included 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.