AN EXTREMELY RARE SERIES OF PLAYING CARDS. In 1798 John Fairburn published a set of playing cards of the English and Welsh counties. The game however is not based on a normal pack of cards. The sole surviving example of the first state comes with a small booklet ‘… intended to render Fairburn’s Game of English Geography clearly understood.’ The game was to capture your opponent’s cards by matching adjoining counties to your own hand. This would produce a flush. The cards each bear numbers for the adjoining counties which refer to the rule book for identification. The first state of the cards lacks these numbers and is possibly considered a proof. Here we have the finished versions. The capitals of each county are written all in uppercase and their distance from London is marked. All the cards are engraved by Robert Rowe. Rowe produced a number of playing cards from this period through to the production of his magnificent folio county atlas in 1816. He produced one further set of county maps as playing cards in conjunction with Joseph Allen in 1811, these are also extremely scarce. Only three collections of the cards are known to exist, two are in private collections and this collection offered here. One card, Essex, is recorded in another collection. None survive in any British institution searched. Provenance: private English collection. Carroll 54.