The Charles H. Kerr Company was founded in Chicago in 1886 by Charles H. Kerr (1860-1944) originally as a religious publisher. By about 1899, Kerr had adopted socialist politics, and he transformed the Charles H. Kerr Company into a leading publisher of socialist, radical, and anti-capitalist texts. In 1900, Kerr helped to found and was the publisher of the International Socialist Review (ISR) magazine. The Kerr company remained a major influence in radical politics in the early twentieth century. To extend the reach of socialist politics and to broaden the appeal of radical ideas, Kerr published a wide range of materials in many different formats, including books, pamphlets, magazines, sheet music, postcards, playing cards, board games and other items. As of 2025, the Charles H. Kerr Company was still in business in Chicago as a worker-owned cooperative.

Mary Tobias Marcy (1877-1922) and her husband Leslie H. Marcy (1871-1947) were socialist writers, journalists, and activists. While living in Kansas City, Mary Marcy wrote an exposé of the meatpacking industry titled, “Letters of a Pork Packer's Stenographer,” which Charles H. Kerr serialized in the International Socialist Review in 1904-05. The Marcys soon moved to Chicago and continued to be close collaborators with Kerr. Mary Marcy worked for many years as an editor of the International Socialist Review. Kerr and the Marcys also frequently worked with Ralph Hosea Chaplin (1867-1961), a labor activist, writer, and artist, who contributed illustrations to the ISR. Kerr, Mary Marcy, Leslie Marcy, and Chaplin collaborated to design the Socialist Playing Cards deck published by the Charles H. Kerr Company in 1908.

This particular deck of Socialist Playing Cards was owned by Dr. Louis Hirsch Orzack (1924-2003), a Professor of Sociology, who taught for many years at Rutgers University. Orzack was also a collector of playing cards and a member of the International Playing-Cards Society. After he acquired this deck in the early 1980s, he conducted research about the Socialist Playing Cards. He and his wife Maressa Hecht Orzack co-authored the article “Political Playing Cards: American Examples,” which analyzed the Socialist Playing Cards, for the November 1982 issue of Journal of the International Playing-Card Society. Four years later, Orzack corresponded with the Charles H. Kerr, Co., in an unsuccessful attempt to reprint the Socialist Playing Cards in conjunction with the 1986 convention of the International Playing-Card Society. This collection contains a small amount of correspondence related to Orzack’s interest in the Socialist Playing Cards during the 1980s.