Today, I shall conclude my brief tour through the early known college decks by attempting to provide a little more information about the deck made for Princeton University by L.W. & H.N. Marshall in 1896, listed as CU2 in chapter 28 of the Hochman Encyclopedia. The first photo shows the front of the original telescope case. The back simply has a card pasted showing the back design, which I believe is much more interesting than the pennants shown on the backs for Harvard and Yale. The second photo shows another of the wonderfully detailed Aces of Spades that were issued with these decks by Marshall, together with the joker (again, apparently appearing for the first time) and a sample of the back design. The drawback with this particular issue is that the buildings depicted on the Ace of Spades and the joker are unnamed which is different from how these same two cards were treated in the Harvard and Yale decks. Otherwise, the interesting similarities are the school cheer appearing within the spade pip on the Ace of Spades and what appears to be a peddler of some sort being featured on each of the jokers. I do not know what the significance of this character is, but if anyone happens to know, please feel free to add your knowledge in this regard to this posting.
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