COLUMBIA'S 330,512 ASSISTANTS

Columbia University has completed a project to catalog one of the world's largest collections of playing cards which includes 6,356 decks spanning almost four centuries and twenty countries. "They're kind of wacky and different for us," said Columbia rare-book librarian Jane Rodgers Siegel, but "once you actually start looking at the cards, they're just fascinating." This quote form an article on the AP Newswire called "Counting Cards" sets the tone for a great article which also discusses the history of many magician's favorite tool. The collection was donated to the school as a part of the bequest of schoolteacher, author, mountain climber, nudist and Salvador Dali archivist Albert Field, who died in 2003. According to the article, "Field started amassing playing cards because they were the only mementos he could find on a post-World War II trip to ravaged Europe."