JANUARY 2025

While adding some Spanish decks to the Bargains section I came across this happy figure. He was added as joker to a deck, which was handmade by Josep Soriano and published by his company, the Artesania de Naip from Igualada (Spain), for the Museo del Naipe in Havana in 2007. Only 25 numbered decks were made, our deck was number 19.
So a very rare joker this month!

Miriam has always made a fiche of every deck that was added to the collection. The info she noted was the usual info about the deck, but also when and where we had acquired it and how much we had paid for it.
On the fiche for this particular deck it was noted as "May 2013, Havana, museum gift".

I had visited Cuba in May 2013 with a donation of 60 decks, ranging from 1890-2013, for that same Museo del Naipe and I remember that Laritza Siméon, the director, gave me a few decks in return. However, I had forgotten all about this and which decks were given, but this must have been one of them. 

FEBRUARY 2025

This joker, together with his different brother from the same deck, had passed through my hands several times. It had been on a stack with jokers to reunite with their decks. Most of them found their home, but this joker and his brother stayed behind, together with 3 other ones. Apparently we didn't have those decks and they were single jokers.

As I liked them both, it was now a choice between brothers. A difficult choice, but this one won. The back advertises the Dutch KLM airlines, but I had never seen such a deck before. Drawn in a comical style, the back shows a yellow wooden shoe with white wings, 2 pilots seated in front and a stewardess with 6 passengers in the back. Together with the nonstandard jokers it made me wonder if the designs of the courts would have been nonstandard too.

The deck was published for KLM by a substitute company of the ASS, the Ariston Playing Card Co. in Detmold, probably around 1949/50. That company was founded in 1947 and the printing was done by Drückerei Gebr. Klingenberg from Detmold. In November 1950 the company was merged into the ASS.

MARCH 2025

On March 25 I was able to acquire two rare Dutch decks. In Gouda I received the probably only known complete "Cato" deck from Pim Leefsma, the artist who had designed the deck, and half an hour later I bought the Lidia Schöfer deck from a collector in Leiden. Still, the choice for this spot was easily made.

Even in the Netherlands this joker is considered to be rare. It comes from a deck that had won a competition for designing a deck of playing cards, which was held by the Institute for the Education in Applied Arts in Amsterdam in 1942, since 1968 known as the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.
The winning design was done by Lidia Schöfer and the deck was printed by a small Dutch printer, the Dieperink & Co. Printing House in Amsterdam. Their name isn't mentioned on the box, but on the top lid of the box the number K 187 is printed.
During the German occupation in WWII printers were obliged to print the K number, assigned to their printing house, on every piece of paper or carton that left their shop. Fortunately a list of all assigned K numbers can be found on line and downloaded as a .pdf.

APRIL 2025

April started on the wrong foot. I was very ill during the first 2½ weeks, then antibiotics and prednisone finally began to do their job. Not fully recovered yet, but it's manageable ever since.
On the last Friday of this month a Dutch collector visited me. He had bought a deck of German cards from me and wanted to pick it up in person. Among other stuff I showed him a stack of jokers, of which I had established that they didn't belong to a deck from our collection. He took 6, but discarded this one. Apparently he already had it.
Funny, because in January I had a visit from another Dutch collector with her hubby and she bought this joker, but wasn't sure if she already had it. I told her that she could return it for a full refund if she did and now you can guess what happened.

So it's obviously not a very rare joker. Still, this cute little fellow is almost 100 years old. The joker came with the Rad-Bridge deck, which was printed and published by Andrew Dougherty from New York in the late 1920's.

MAY 2025

It was a much better month. I was well enough to make a trip by car to the north of Spain and visit the house of Dali in Port Lligat and his museum in Figuerès. Still easily out of breath when walking, I had brought my small, foldable electric bike, which made it much easier to get around in a town. Of course my trip started in Paris, where I used my bike to go to 2 antique markets. But no interesting decks there, except some highly overpriced ones.

So this time a joker from one of Miriam's albums. I came to choose the "Women" album and going through the sheets my eye first stopped at the "Vive Les Girls" joker, but not much later I found this one.
The joker comes from a double deck called "Quick to the Draw". Both decks held this joker, but the courts have a standard international pattern. Only the backs show 2 different pin-up designs by Joyce Ballantine. She probably designed this joker too. The decks were printed by Brown&Bigelow and first published in 1946. Not long afterwards, the double decks were printed to be published by small companies as a gift for their clients or business contacts.

In her short poem I found the "ten-gallon hat" rather intriguing. Isn't a US gallon close to 4 liters? That must have been quite a hat!

The jokers of the month from.....