During the ongoing process of sorting out the newly acquired collection we come across decks that we've never seen before or only as pictures in a book. This deck we only knew from the catalogue of Nordic decks by Ali Jerremalm. But this isn't the only deck from that catalogue. It seems that the newly acquired collection is quite complementary to our own collection of Scandinavian and Baltic states decks. There are at least about 40 decks that we can add to our own collection, with some real beauties from the Baltic States and Finland. So far there are only very few duplicate ones.

The way in which we have to find our way through the collection brings up decks from different countries and different decades. I thought we had found most of the interesting old Scandinavian decks, so this little pearl came as a surprise. It's printed in chromolithography and the courts show mediaeval kings, queens and knights or soldiers. Their names in Norwegian are printed in full above the large pip. The deck was printed and published as "Dragon" by the Kristiania Lithografiske Aktiebolag. From Ali's catalogue we also learned that the AB signature on the QH are the initials of Andreas Bloch, who had designed these lovely courts. Louis Bausch had dated this deck as 1890-1905. In his catalogue Ali mentions that there are some variations known and he has illustrated this entry with an advertising deck for the Norwegian American Line from around 1920. It has a special AS and joker. Our deck doesn't have a joker. Because the top of our box is missing and there's no mention of number of cards on the sides, it's possible that there should have been a joker..... or not.

The tax stamp on the AS was, according to Peter Endebrock's site, in use from 1910 to 1930. Our deck is a factory edition, so probably a little older than the advertising deck and I think we'll have to adjust Louis' dating to 1910 - 1915.