The morning of the first Sunday of this month was spend in Velddriel, at a collectors meeting. There were again less participants and visitors than in December, but Joop came home with some nice finds. A week later Miriam could join him to go to the yearly Collectors Day at the National Playing Cards Museum in Turnhout. It was nice to see most of the Belgian collectors again and as always a good number of the Dutch collectors showed up too. We found a few nice decks there and a Dutch fellow collector surprised us with an interesting gift: a wholesale box for 12 decks by the Spanish manufacturer Hija de B. Fournier S.I. from Burgos. It has found a spot in one of our glass show cases that same day. 

However, a few days after our return from Turnhout Miriam had a new outburst of her lung emphysema and ended up in hospital again not long after. This time her stay there lasted for a week, but she returned home again just in time to have her say in this month's choice. With a little help from Ebay and the Dutch auction site, there was quite a list to choose from. Worth mentioning are a rarely seen vintage French deck by Camoin with an antique single image pattern, a South African souvenir deck from around 1930 and a new and modern Icelandic "Fornsagnaspil" deck. We also acquired a salesman's book by the Belgian manufacturer Van Genechten S.A. from Turnhout, with some twenty pages of examples of different types of cards, probably from the 1930's.

And we shouldn't forget to mention the gift from Linnea Gits and Peter Dunham: a Blue Blood Redux deck. We must have missed that one at Kickstarter and it's almost sold out now, so a much appreciated gesture. The deck and a comparison with the original Blue Blood deck can be seen in the Art&Cards section.

There's only a faint tax stamp on the Ace of Diamonds and the deck came without a box, so there's nothing to indicate a date. The back design is interesting though. In a mirrored version this pattern of diagonal "waves" and "sea stars" has been used for the backs of at least two different decks by L.P. Holmblad. One was dated c1840 and the other c1880. It's not much to go by, but we believe that our deck probably dates from the last decade of the nineteenth century.