A collection of essays by the Metropolitan Museum's longime print curator and noted art critic A. Hyatt Mayor, along with a bibliography of his various articles, reviews, calendars, forewords, and nine published books.

This book describes the playing-cards peculiar to Spain from the earliest fourteenth-century records to the present day. A major contribution this book makes toward the study of cards is the extension and elaboration of the classification system of playing-cards. The fifteen or so "standard" designs of Spanish cards that evolved into the patterns preferred for everyday use are systematically described and illustrated. This will assist collectors and catalogers for identification purposes.