Today’s installment of “Poker & Pop Culture” shares a bit from a collection of stories I found a few years back -- actually a couple of collections -- these stories about the invented Thompson Street Poker Club originally written for Life magazine way back in the 1880s by Henry Guy Carleton.
I’m discussing the books as part of a short series of articles about early “poker clubs” (both real and fictional), but they are probably most notable because they involve the earliest “poker books” featuring African American characters.
As with all of these columns, there are long, interesting (to me) detours that I usually need to cut out both because of space considerations and those side roads tend to be a little too obscure or off the beaten path.