This new book showcases rare vintage board games
Today’s digital video games might be feasts for the eye but beautiful games aren’t a new invention. To prove that, all you have to do is pick up a copy of “Georgian and Victorian Board Games: The Liman Collection,” a new release from Pointed Leaf Press.
The book features 50 British board games dating from the late18th century to the mid-19th century from the collection of Palm Beach resident Ellen Liman and her late husband, Arthur.
The games were made with intricately detailed, hand-colored engravings. They’re filled with lively scenes, ranging from the wonders of the world to moral lessons depicting the follies of vice and the rewards of virtue. And, because they’re so fragile, they’re very rare.
Some games, such as Every Man to His Station, A New Game, published in 1825, inculcated virtues as players advanced from lowlier occupations to knighthood. Each station is accompanied by a rhyme.
Others, such as European Travellers, An Instructive Game, taught players about distant places as their markers moved across a beautifully illustrated map.
And some were just for fun. Fortunio & His Seven Gifted Servants, from 1846, sets play within an amusing, rhyming story.
The Limans framed and displayed the games, or left them protected in their cases. “We never played them,” Ellen Liman said.
But readers can. The book includes five oversized foldouts of games with instructions big enough to play on.
Liman, a painter, art dealer and author of several decorating books, valued the games for their artistry. Her husband, who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, was intrigued by the window the games provided into the morals and habits of the times.
He writes about that in the foreword, taken from a document his wife found in the collection files as she was researching the book. Ellen Liman wrote all the captions.
They both enjoyed the hunt. “For my husband, collecting was like playing a game to win,” she said.
They scored their finds at fancy antique stores, yard sales, auction houses, flea markets and fairs.
“We were always the earliest in the morning to arrive, often in the dark, with flashlights in hand, to beat out the competition,” Liman writes in the preface.
Liman approached Pointed Leaf Press about the book because she’s reached the time of life when she’s considering finding a museum home for them, as she has for the couple’s other collections of antique games, books and toys. The book serves as a catalog, a memento, a pleasurable read and a resource for scholars, she said.
“It’s a social history and a historical record of the period in a very visual and unusual way,” she said. “The material appeals on many levels.”
Publisher Suzanne Slesin has known Liman and her books since the early 1980s.
“I was aware of Arthur’s and Ellen’s collections of antique games,” she said. “Ellen’s description of this particular collection — and the opportunity to look at it closely and learn more about the games — was an intriguing proposition.”
During the early 19th century, games emerged as a means of entertaining and educating children, who were just being recognized as something other than little adults. Book publishers, who also established children’s literature as a profitable genre, jumped on the chance to supply the demand.
The publishers are wellknown. But the artists were almost always anonymous. Their identities might be lost to time, but thanks to the book, their work is not.