December 2007
This month we chose this "Deck of the Month" not because it's a rare or very special deck, but because it has a story to tell.....
We found this deck on
a Dutch collectors meeting in 1998, probably not long after it had been
published in Indonesia. We liked the style of the design, especially for the
vague gray/white drawings of the different traditional Indonesian houses in the
background. After we had added it to our collection, it remained there until a
few years ago. Usually we don't take any non-standard decks out of our
collection, but then 2 friends asked us if they could "borrow" our
deck. They had held a mail-auction and sold this deck, but later found out that
they had mixed this one up with another deck. As they promised to find us a
fresh copy again, we didn't hesitate and gave them our deck. But their promise
turned out too hard to keep. Of course after a while they have compensated us
with a different deck, but the original plastic showcase in the Indonesian
section remained empty. Even when we started looking for the deck on Ebay, we
couldn't find one. Probably not because it hadn't been offered, but because we
checked the auctions at the wrong moments. Anyway, it took about 2 years before
we spotted the deck in Jean Darquenne's Cartorama catalogue. A quick email and
this month it was ours again.
Of course there's a moral to this story, but it's
not to never help out your friends anymore. We wouldn't hesitate, when asked
again. But............. don't ever think too lightly about finding it again.
Even this "simple" deck took longer than expected.
The deck was published in Indonesia for Garuda, the national Indonesian airline. Their name can be found on all the aces and on the box. The backdesigns shows the company's logo.
Each suit represents one of the regional ethnographical groups that can be found in Indonesia. All wear traditional dresses and their traditional housing. There's no explicative card to tell us which regions are represented here. A few years earlier the Garuda had published a similar deck, without the nice backgrounds though, but in that deck there was a caption on each card explaining the dress and region.
The deck consists
of 52 cards and 2 jokers.
It comes in a dark blue box with the name and logo of
the Garuda airlines on it.
