APACHE PLAYING CARDS FROM THE WAYLAND COLLECTION
About Apache Playing Cards from the Wayland Collection
30 copies remaining of First Edition of 750
Portfolio with 4 color, life-size photographs of cards, 15.5 x 10.5 inches
Paperback 10-page booklet, 6.25 x 9.5 inches
Wayland Playing Card Monographs No. 3. Privately printed by Virginia and Harold Wayland, Pasadena, California, 1981.
In their decades of researching Apache rawhide playing cards, the Waylands had occasion to purchase several packs, but kept only one—the finest they had encountered in any public or private collection.
The cards were purchased by William Henry Wood, an American mail carrier, from an Apache woman just outside Fort Bowie, Arizona, in 1875, the year before Geronimo's final surrender. Thirtynine of the forty cards survived the years, and were purchased from the Wood family by the Waylands in 1963. One of the four or five most elaborately painted Apache packs known, the Wayland pack displays the metamorphosis of Spanish and Mexican Reys, Caballos, Sotas, and Coin, Cup, Sword and Club numeral cards into an unmistakably Apache genre of folk-art.
In 2006, the Waylands' daughters sold these cards to the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where they have strengthened that institution's already strong collections of Chiricahua and Western Apache ethnographic materials.
P.O. Box 87965
Tucson, AZ 85754
U.S.A.
