The German Playing Card Museum (german: Deutsches Spielkartenmuseum) in

Leinfelden-Echterdingen Leinfelden-Echterdingen (Swabian: ''Laefälda-Ächdordeng'') is a town in the district of Esslingen, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is located approximately 10 km south of Stuttgart, near the Stuttgart Airport and directly adjacent to t ...

is a branch of the Württemberg State Museum and houses one of the largest public

playing cards A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a fi ...

collections in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

. It is open to all

ludologist Game studies, also known as ludology (from ''ludus'', "game", and ''-logia'', "study", "research"), is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a field of cultural studies that deals with a ...

s and those with private interests. Playing cards are systematically collected, archived and researched. The collection includes around 15,000 decks with over 500,000 individual cards, a games library with an archive, a graphics collection, as well as arts and crafts objects, card presses, glasses, gaming tables, etc. One rarity is its Asian-Indian collection. It is considered the most comprehensive museum of its type in the world. The museum is a member of the

International Playing Card Society The International Playing-Card Society (IPCS) is a non-profit organisation for those interested in playing cards, their design, and their history. While many of its members are collectors of playing cards, they also include historians of playing car ...

History

The history of the playing card museum began in 1923 in

Altenburg Altenburg () is a city in Thuringia, Germany, located south of Leipzig, west of Dresden and east of Erfurt. It is the capital of the Altenburger Land district and part of a polycentric old-industrial textile and metal production region betw ...

in Thuringia. On the initiative of Julius Benndorf, editor of the ''Altenburger Skatkalender'' (pseudonym Benno Dirf), and with the help of Carl Schneider, director of the United Stralsund Playing Card Manufacturers (later ASS), a one-room playing card museum called the ''Skatheimat'' (home of Skat), was added to the local history museum in Altenburg Castle, founded four years earlier by Albrecht von der Gabelentz. By 1939, 6000 different packs of cards had been collected. In 1946, during the dismantling of the ASS playing card factory by the Soviet Military Administration in Thuringia, the museum's collection was also removed; its whereabouts are unclear. The expropriated company of ASS, which was relocated to West Germany after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, first to Mannheim, then 1956 to Leinfelden, built up a collection there in a new company museum, the ''ASS Museum''. ASS continued to acquire other playing card manufacturers, some of which had more or less large company archives, but also private collections that exclusively benefited the museum: * Dr. Martin von Hase Collection, 1950 * Franz Ritter von Hauslab Collection, 1955 In 1972, ASS also took over the German Playing Card Museum with

Bielefelder Spielkarten Bielefelder Spielkarten was a mid-20th century, German manufacturer of playing cards based in Bielefeld, Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous cou ...

in Bielefeld, which had also acquired several important collections: * Dr. Werner Jakstein Collection, 1952 * Richard Kaselowsky Collection, 1955 * Rudolf von Leyden Collection, 1956 The museum in Leinfelden was given the name of the new acquisition. In 1974, the German Playing Card Museum was opened on the site of today's ''Schönbuchschule''. On 18 August 1982, the Museum was sold to the state of

Baden-Württemberg Baden-Württemberg (; ), commonly shortened to BW or BaWü, is a German state () in Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the southern part of Germany's western border with France. With more than 11.07 million inhabitants across a ...

and the city of Leinfelden-Echterdingen due to the increasingly narrow financial margin at ASS. Leinfelden-Echterdingen became sponsors of the museum, which also became a branch of the Württemberg State Museum. In 1983, a friends association was formed. The town of Leinfelden-Echterdingen closed the exhibition on 30 June 2012 and converted the museum into an archive that can be viewed by appointment. The reason was that the museum was running at a loss.''Town closes the playing card museum''
Stuttgarter-Zeitung.de, 22 June 2012, retrieved 23 June 2012. Exhibitions are put on in the municipal museum of Leinfelden-Echterdingen.

References

External links

{{Coordinate, NS=48.69015 , EW=9.13848 , type=landmark , region=DE-BW Museums in Baden-Württemberg Esslingen (district) Organisations based in Baden-Württemberg Playing card organisations 1923 establishments in Germany