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This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery. 

Cards are found in many games, across time and place. They can be adapted to appeal to different ages, different playing styles, and even different commercial franchises. The history of card games is very much one of evolution and innovation. Though the 52-card deck has existed since the 15th century, thought to originate in France, the oldest playing cards are thought to date back to the Tang Dynasty during the first millennium. Though the cards that we’re familiar with today are made of plastic-coated cardstock, Tang Dynasty playing cards were made of paper, printed with woodcuts, and doubled as a form of currency.

In his History of Playing Cards, Rodney P. Carlisle talks about the rise in popularity of playing cards across Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries:  

“Writings from this period document card games being played in Spain by 1371, and in France and Switzerland by 1377. The early decks were handmade works of art available only to the rich, but the introduction of the mass production of paper around 1400, coupled with the popularity of woodcut printing, quickly led to the creation of inexpensive decks for the general public.” 

Cards have a wide range of uses. Historically, they’ve been used as collection items, to tell fortunes, for currency, and of course, for gambling, having been associated with gambling for as long as they’ve been around. Card players from the Tang Dynasty would have used the cards themselves as betting money, raising the stakes by literally gambling away the hands they played with. As card playing spread across Europe, some governments found themselves more troubled by this new pastime than they’d expected. Carlisle wrote that “[in 1397] the prévôt of Paris declared a workday ban on recreations that could distract workers; in addition to cards, dice, tennis, and all forms of bowling were named in the decree.” 

Possibly the only use for cards as famous as gambling is fortune telling. Tarot cards are a popular form of fortune telling, along with oracle decks, though fortune tellers have also been known to use regular card decks to tell fortunes. Le Livre du Destin, or The Book of Fate, is a French 32-card oracle deck from 1900. It features a wide variety of different archetypes of people, in typical fortune telling fashion, all meant to relate to some potential aspect of a person’s life.  

Before we can understand how to use The Book of Fate, we must first understand how tarot and oracle decks work. Tarot is more universally known and also follows a more rigid system of rules than oracle decks. Tarot decks are made up of 78 cards, the most well-known of which are the Major Arcana. Major Arcana take the form of archetypes, such as “The Empress,” “The Fool,” “The Hermit,” or “The Hanged Man.” These cards represent broad life lessons and challenges that we may face, like going through a loss, a change in direction, or new beginnings. Sound vague? They’re meant to be! The answers that tarot gives are broad and are accepted to not take shape for days to weeks or even months after a reading. 

So, what’s the difference between tarot and oracle reading? Oracle decks are much more freeform, with no standard number of cards and no consistent imagery from deck to deck. Typically, oracle cards rely on our immediate intuition for interpretation, and are better suited to answer more specific, “yes/no” type questions. While a tarot reading invites the reader to meditate on what the answers could mean, oracle cards require a good deal less overthinking. So, since The Book of Fate is an oracle deck, we should ask questions that are less vague and more to-the-point than what we’d ask if we were reading tarot. Additionally, the types of cards in the deck will let us know what types of answers we’ll get. The cards in The Book of Fate are based mostly on common social roles, characters, or themes seen among English or French society in the late Victorian era, such as “a soldier,” “a man of law,” “a fair-haired girl,” or “a business letter.”  

Of course, while their use might be more straightforward than tarot, oracle readings do still take a little interpretive work from the user. After all, the point of fortune telling decks is that they can be applied to and interpreted by just about anyone, regardless of circumstance or background!  

The Book of Fate is on display in the Main Library Gallery’s Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education exhibition, which showcases the fascinating world of paper technologies. Curated by Giselle Simón, Damien Ihrig, and Elizabeth Yale, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore paper dolls, flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance. It is open to the public through Dec. 19, 2025. 

Further reading:

“History of Playing Cards.” In Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, edited by Carlisle, Rodney P., 289-93. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412971935.n170.

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery.

Everyone can relate to the experience of playing with toys as a little kid. Whether Barbie dolls or action figures, dump trucks or Hot Wheels, the toys we played with were vehicles for our imagination and the stories we wanted to tell. Of course, this is far from a new phenomenon. Dolls specifically have been around for thousands of years, with the oldest examples being made of stone and clay and more recent examples being made of plastic or porcelain. One of the first commercially available paper dolls was made in 1810 by S & J Fuller. Her name was Little Fanny, and she quickly sparked a whole genre of children’s toys of a similar style.

For those who couldn’t afford the luxury cost of a porcelain doll or for those who simply couldn’t sew, paper dolls offered an easily accessible alternative, with both everyday people as well as large corporations making their own versions. The paper clothing pictured below was handmade by Lois Crasper Thor from Clinton, Iowa circa the mid-20th century. While commercial versions of paper dolls certainly existed during the time these were made, dolls like these were perhaps the most common sort. Anyone could make their own dolls with whatever clothes they liked, and often a profession and life story to match. Paper dolls were, and continue to be, an outlet for childhood storytelling and imagination. Part of what they represented was possibility—the idea that you really could be anything.

Of course, the existence of handmade paper dolls didn’t mean that the commercial doll industry was suffering. In Old Paper Dolls: Popular Adult Collectibles, Anne Gilbert writes about the rise of the paper doll: “By 1859 Godey’s Lady’s Book began publishing a complete series of paper dolls; six boys and six girls, with a set of their own newest fashions.” Like all dolls, paper dolls were equally influential in terms of both gender roles and clothing trends, the two were often intertwined. By the early 20th century, popular fashion and homemaking newspapers and magazines such as McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion were publishing their own paper doll families. Dolls have a history of reflecting pop culture at the time—current fashion trends, as well as popular occupations or hobbies. Movie stars, horse jockeys, tennis players, artists, and more can all be found represented in different paper dolls.

Just as we might find different toy franchises featuring modern celebrities with their own toys or dolls today, celebrities and public figures have also historically been represented by paper dolls. Though women were made into dolls more often than men, certain exceptions, like this 1981 copy of The First Family Paper Doll & Cut-Out Book featuring Ronald and Nancy Reagan, serve as small reminders that the demographic wasn’t completely singular. Though there were certainly more paper dolls fashioned around women and girls, dolls fashioned around boys and men existed and were in some cases highly prized by their owners, much like the Ken dolls of today.

The materials in this article are on display in the Main Library Gallery’s  Paper Engineering in Art, Science, and Education exhibition, which showcases the fascinating world of paper technologies. Curated by Giselle Simón, Damien Ihrig, and Elizabeth Yale, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore paper dolls, flap books, pop-ups, tunnel books, volvelles, and books that use paper to make sounds while learning about their historical and contemporary significance. It is open to the public through Dec. 19, 2025.

This series features the work and research of UI students. The following was written by Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery.

The Symbolist Movement took place in France and Belgium in the late 19th century as a response to styles that emphasized realistic and classical forms. Visitors to the Main Library Gallery’s spring 2025 exhibit, A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive will note the wide variety of abstract and non-traditional art throughout the gallery. This is because the Symbolists believed that deeper meanings could be discovered through art that did not attempt to make sense of the subject through literal portrayal. Symbolism is still used by many artists today.

Though the exhibit focuses on works inspired by French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” we can see the influence of notable American poet Edgar Allan Poe in several pieces within the exhibit. The goal of Symbolist art is to use abstract visuals to represent specific concepts—anything from the mourning, uncertainty, or twisting anxiety we see in Poe’s poems to the breaking of barriers and boundaries in Mallarme’s “Un coup de dés.”

Poe’s use of concepts like dreams, abstraction, and psychoanalysis made him very popular among the Symbolist crowd, especially with his focus on darker concepts. Charles Baudelaire was the first person to translate Poe to French, and Stéphane Mallarmé was the first to translate The Raven, specifically. Poe became an influential figure among the Symbolists for the way that he used imagery in his writing to communicate so clearly the themes of his stories. The Raven stands as an excellent example of this. Many of Poe’s stories center on a protagonist who carries on toward some sort of breaking point—a moment at which we realize that something about the story, whether it be the protagonist or the world around them, is no longer what it seems. In The Raven, for example, what drives our protagonist toward his mounting mental breakdown is the presence of the titular raven, who repeats the word “nevermore” over and over. The protagonist interprets meaning into this message—grief and dread, and inescapable loss, though these themes are never communicated directly to us.   

To quote scholar James Lawler on Poe’s Symbolist influence, “For Baudelaire he was ‘one of the greatest of literary heroes,’ for Mallarmé ‘the spiritual Prince of this age,’ for Valéry an ‘achieved mind’: Symbolists that stand at the beginning, middle, and end of a lineage are constant in their fidelity to Poe. They encountered half-secretly, each in turn, a stranger to the canon and found in him the key to their works, for he served Baudelaire against Hugo, Mallarmé against Baudelaire, Valéry against Mallarmé. Distinct from the native conventions, he provoked less violence or anxiety than the intimate ferment of self-recognition.” 

A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive is open through June 27, 2025. Learn more about the exhibit and the Main Library Gallery’s open hours at lib.uiowa.edu/gallery. The Main Library Gallery is free and open to the public.   

The fall 2024 Main Library Gallery exhibition, Hawkeye Histories | Sporting Stories, is now available to view online.

The virtual tour is a self-paced journey through the exhibition. It features 360° photos of the Main Library Gallery, which allow the viewer to move from area to area. The exhibit text and the items on display are clickable, meaning transcripts and close-up views of many objects are available along with information from curator Dr. Jennifer Sterling.

To read about the specific items on display in the Main Library Gallery for Hawkeye Histories | Sporting Stories, check out the exhibition guide online. To see the virtual version of this exhibit in full screen, click the full screen icon in the lower right corner of the tour preview above, or visit the exhibit here.

More about this exhibit:

From Nile Kinnick to Caitlin Clark and Duke Slater to Christine Grant, Hawkeyes have been breaking records, navigating barriers, and making sports history since the University of Iowa’s first teams emerged in the late 1800s.

Curated by Dr. Jennifer Sterling, Hawkeye Histories | Sporting Stories examines the role sports has played at Iowa throughout the changing landscape of intercollegiate athletics and explores Iowa’s first men’s and women’s teams at the turn of the 20th century, the emergence of big-time men’s sports in the mid-1900s, and the rise of women athletes from the 1970s onward.

Thank you to the University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums for partnering with the Main Library Gallery to make this virtual experience available.

By Sara J. Pinkham and Krista Hershberger

As the creative coordinator for the University of Iowa Libraries, Lauren Coghlan manages visual design across all seven libraries, creating everything from print materials to signage. As an artist, Lauren is always especially excited about one of the more unique challenges of the job: creating the look and feel for Main Library Gallery exhibitions. 

“As the exhibit designer, it’s my job to create and facilitate production of all printed collateral for each exhibit,” explains Lauren. This includes the panels inside the cases and on the walls, vinyl on the walls and windows, exhibit guides, artwork labels, posters, digital slides, and any other pieces unique to a specific project. Lauren loves that no two exhibits are the same. “I have total creative freedom and it’s great to be more artistic and work with my hands more,” she explains. 

While guest curators for each Main Library Gallery exhibit research, select objects for display, and write the educational narrative, Lauren ensures that the presentation is visually compelling and immersive through graphic design. 

“The overall feel of the exhibition is a collaboration between myself and the curator,” says Lauren. “The curators often have some idea of what they are looking for, but it’s my job to interpret those ideas into a cohesive look for each exhibit.” 

Lauren brainstormed design concepts with guest curator Rich Dana, the Sackner Archive Project coordinator librarian for Special Collections and Archives, for the spring 2025 exhibit, A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive. She chose a bold aesthetic with red and black colors, and was influenced by specific objects in the exhibit and by Dadaism, the broader art movement which inspired some of the works on display. 

A Roll of the Dice follows the influence of an 1897 work by French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. His avant-garde poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” [A throw of the dice will never abolish chance] ultimately contributed to graphic design as we know it today by challenging print design customs of the time. The pioneering poem later lent itself well to Dada artwork and showed up frequently during this brief movement in post-World War I Europe (ca. 1915-1922). Like the poem itself, Dadaism challenged traditional notions of beauty and form through art. Since its publication, artists and writers have continued to explore the mystery of “Un coup” and its revolutionary layout by reprinting and creating their own versions of the poem, or crafting works influenced by it, through a wide variety of mediums.  

“I was inspired by the design of many covers of ‘Un coup,’ many of which feature a white background, black and red borders, and red and black text,” says Lauren “On a broader level, I was inspired by Dadaism. Dada designers often used black, white, and red elements along with bold, condensed typefaces in their designs.” 

Once design is finalized for an exhibit and printed panels have arrived, Lauren also helps with installation alongside other Libraries colleagues. Exhibit production for the Main Library Gallery involves a core project team that works for months ahead of opening day. Exhibition and Engagement Coordinator Sara Pinkham manages the production process and logistics for each exhibit from start to finish, along with directing day-to-day gallery operations. Conservator Technician and Exhibit Preparator Bill Voss starts building custom display mounts for each object weeks before installation begins, ensuring that materials selected by curators are shown safely and elegantly. University Conservator Giselle Simón determines conservation treatment needs for materials ahead of display, handles necessary framing, and helps facilitate item loans. Giselle, Bill, and their colleagues in Conservation and Collections Care carry out prescribed treatments before exhibit installation. This can mean careful removal of adhesives, binding repairs, gentle cleaning, and more depending on the conditions of the selected materials.   

A Roll of the Dice featured a few unique endeavors for the Main Library Gallery, including an extensive vinyl installation around the inside perimeter. Lauren designed, printed, and applied the vinyl, along with support from the team. 

“This piece required a lot of forethought, but seeing it come together—and that my math was correct—was fun,” Lauren remarks. “I also conquered my fear of ladders after having to be on one for over twelve hours to place the vinyl on the walls.” 

When asked what advice she would give to graphic design students working with larger physical spaces, Lauren emphasized accessibility and user experience along with logistical preparation. 

“Put accessibility into the forefront of the design process,” she says. “This includes thinking about the space needed to maneuver wheelchairs, placing wall panels at accessible heights, color contrast for increased legibility, and choosing font sizes for effective reading. I am always learning about how I can increase accessibility in my work, and I encourage others to do the same. I also strongly recommend taking the time to create to-scale mockups of the space you’re designing for. I’ve found it extremely helpful to have all decisions about installation layout and measurements made before installation begins.” 

If you missed it during the 2025 spring semester, view the A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive exhibit guide, curator highlights, and more on the Main Library Gallery website.