October 2022

This month a busy social life ruled my agenda. Lunches and dinners at or with friends. I hardly had to cook a meal here at home. An unwilling shoulder needed quite a lot of appointments with a physiotherapist and of course my immune-therapy is still going on. I'm halfway now. So, no time to find a new deck for this spot.

Last month a last minute buy at the IPCS convention in Madrid was chosen for this spot and now I chose one of the runners up from the convention. In fact it was the first deck that I picked up from one of the Spanish collectors. A day later I bought 3 more decks from an other Spanish collector. What the 4 decks had in common was that they all were published as single, collectible cards, that were gifts with certain products, often with chocolate bars. Hence this type of cards is also referred to as "chocolate cards". They almost always have advertising on the backs, as said often for chocolate manufacturers, but also for other products. All these Spanish decks are dated 1920's and 1930's, which made me believe that the idea of collectible playing cards was at least inspired by the French chocolate cards, which were already published a decade earlier.

These Spanish decks were aimed at children and young adults. This deck here was obviously made for young children. You could say that the style and figures define the age of the children it was made for. Although I'm much, much older, I still like the style. And I always appreciate the presence of different animals in older decks for children (see September 2021). 
The deck was illustrated by Juan Pérez del Muro (Mexico 1895 - Barcelona 1949), who had settled in Spain in 1919 and became a well known illustrator there. Juan Pérez del Muro has illustrated the Baraja Infantil deck in the 1930's and this Baraja Zoologica deck also dates from that decade. It was printed by Lit. M. Garcia from Valencia and published by Reclamos Garcia Cantos as an advertising deck for Calzados Segarra. This company has made shoes (calzados) and boots in Vall de Uxo since 1882 and is still active. Their shoes were produced with the Goodyear stitching (cosido) system and apparently the company had a shop in Madrid in the Callao district.

Now that there's nothing left to tell about this deck................. ENJOY!
The usual Spanish suits have been replaced:  coins are eggs, swords are kitchen knives, clubs are asparagus and cups are fish bowls.

The deck consists of 40 cards, numbered randomly on the backs.

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