deck-19-01

After the December break Joop has resumed his eBay auctions and is following the offer on the different auction sites again. However, he was outbid on several interesting antique decks, so there were no relevant additions for our collection from the auction sites. And there were no important collectors meetings or markets either, so we had a problem to fill this spot.
However, halfway January Miriam has started to process all the new decks, not only from the LB collection, but also those that we had bought on eBay, fleamarkets and antique shows. Some went back to the spring of 2017! Anyway, we've started with the German decks and it's nice to see all those rare or wonderful decks again. They have found their way into the plastic sheets, numbered and catalogued in our filing system, and new folders, so we've decided to look at them as a source of "new" decks for this spot.

Because of the large number, we had a difficult choice to make. We could give you a long shortlist, but Joop had decided to take pictures of each sheet and we'll share them with you. Just click HERE.

According to LB's note the chosen deck was made F.X. Schmid from Munich and published in 1924. There was no mention of the artist who had designed the courts and the deck came without the original box , so we went looking for some more information about this deck. It turned out to be more difficult than expected. We looked in several books about German cards and went through a whole stack of Cartorama's, but the only reference we could find was to the patience version (Cartorama 49, p. 48), which was published as "Künstler Patience Karten" in 1932. It has the same designs on the courts, but apparently even Jean didn't know the name of the artist. Because the small version has the same designs, it's well possible that this regular sized version was published as "Künstler Karten". The courts show royalty and noblemen in medieval dress, set against a grayish background within a bronze-brown coloured outline. The large pips have a similar outline, not only on the courts and aces, but on all pip cards. On each of the aces the pips have a different embellishment. Maker's name is on the Ace of Hearts, just like the German tax stamp. It's a rarely seen deck, so......

The deck consists of 52 cards and a (standard) joker. Our deck came without a box.

		ENJOY!