The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
Place of origin: The cards seem to be English, judging from the language
on the back of the cards, their shape and size, and the generic courtly
representations of the face cards (French, Spanish, German, and Dutch
court cards were all based on historical personages; only the English used
generic figures).
Last known owner: Hugh Hewley, British antiquarian, antique dealer,
and compulsive pickpocket. After he drowned during a fly-fishing accident
in Wales, all of his possessions—debts as well as antiques—passed to his
Cambridge-educated son Antony, who worked as a freelance Russian interpreter
in London but whose principal income came from the poker table. Immediately
following Hugh’s death, Antony traveled to Latvia for reasons that remain
unclear. When he returned, he handily paid off all of his father’s outstanding
debts and sold the store and everything in it to the Southall Icemen, a midseventies
London gang run by Azim Mehmood and Stony Rosen.The cards were
found nowhere in the store, which is odd, as Hugh attested that he always kept
them locked in a safe in the back of his store and repeatedly refused their sale at
any price, to any customer. The story was given out that the cards were on his
person when he drowned, and they disintegrated at the bottom of the Severn.
Antony died, supposedly of a heroin overdose, two weeks after selling the
business to the Icemen. He left no descendants.
Estimated value: Singular decks of cards can easily command upward
of $100,000: consider that the buyers tend to be gamblers, often have
large amounts of cash that it behooves them never to deposit or declare, and
they are paying, in effect, for at least forty separate individual paintings.
In 1889 Prince Albert decided to shave and regrow his beard during
the annual summer holiday at Balmoral; he had the royal portrait artist
paint his picture every day for fifty-two days and then had a deck of cards
printed to commemorate the process. In 1972 agents acting for Frankie
“Chicken Man” Testa bought the deck in a private auction for $120,000; the
deck became known as “Al’s Chops,” after the prince’s facial hair as well as
the Philadelphia restaurant where the Chicken Man held court.
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