The collection spans 50 countries and four centuries and touches on subjects ranging from beer marketing to 19th-century Portuguese politics.

Columbia University has a collection of playing cards that is among the world's largest, a trove of 6,356 decks that the Ivy League institution painstakingly catalogued this spring after they were donated to the school by an eccentric collector.

Ranging from simple woodblock prints from 1550s Austria to a 1963 American pack with admiring caricatures of the Kennedy family, the collection isn't just a novelty, but a rich, if offbeat, resource for research. Scholars say cards can be useful records of social history, depicting how cultural touchstones, political figures and historical events were seen in their times.

"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."

The collection is a significant addition to playing-card repositories held by libraries, museums and other institutions around the world. London's Guildhall Library has a similar-sized collection, curator John Fisher said; some other institutions boast as many as 10,000 decks, according to the International Playing-Cards Society, a group of collectors and enthusiasts.

The earliest European references to playing cards date to the 1300s, though a domino-like form emerged earlier in China.

Besides fueling countless parlor games and wagers, cards have served as souvenirs, erotica, satire, fortunetelling tools, advertising for everything from airlines to suspenders, and educational primers. A 1677 English pack in Columbia's collection is crammed with facts about places from China to Florida.

Cards also have trumpeted propaganda _ Columbia's holdings include a World War I-era German deck sketching such scenes as "Zeppelin Uber England," for instance. More recently, cards have been used to try to solve crimes, on "cold case" packs distributed to prison inmates in hopes of eliciting tips.

Columbia's collection was the result of a bequest from a man almost as colorful as his cards: schoolteacher, author, mountain climber, nudist and Salvador Dali archivist Albert Field, who died in 2003.

For Field, cards were part of a ravenous appetite for collecting that extended to transit tokens and bus transfers, said Frank Hunter, a longtime friend and partner in Field's work as an authenticator of Dali's prints.

Field's interests ranged from hiking _ he traversed a good deal of the Appalachian Trail, and in the nude, no less _ to mystery novels, Hunter said. Field believed he had solved a legendary literary whodunit, Charles Dickens' unfinished "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and was trying to get his analysis published when he died at 86, according to his friend. Continued...