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JANUARY 2025 While
adding some Spanish decks to the Bargains section I came across this
happy figure. He was added as joker to a deck, which was handmade by
Josep Soriano and published by his company, the Artesania de Naip from
Igualada (Spain), for the Museo del Naipe in Havana in 2007. Only 25
numbered decks were made, our deck was number 19. Miriam
has always made a fiche of every deck that was added to the collection.
The info she noted was the usual info about the deck, but also when and
where we had acquired it and how much we had paid for it. I had visited Cuba in May 2013 with a donation of 60 decks, ranging from 1890-2013, for that same Museo del Naipe and I remember that Laritza Siméon, the director, gave me a few decks in return. However, I had forgotten all about this and which decks were given, but this must have been one of them. |
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FEBRUARY 2025 This joker, together with his different brother from the same deck, had passed through my hands several times. It had been on a stack with jokers to reunite with their decks. Most of them found their home, but this joker and his brother stayed behind, together with 3 other ones. Apparently we didn't have those decks and they were single jokers. As I liked them both, it was now a choice between brothers. A difficult choice, but this one won. The back advertises the Dutch KLM airlines, but I had never seen such a deck before. Drawn in a comical style, the back shows a yellow wooden shoe with white wings, 2 pilots seated in front and a stewardess with 6 passengers in the back. Together with the nonstandard jokers it made me wonder if the designs of the courts would have been nonstandard too. The deck was published by an substitute company of the ASS, the Ariston Playing Card Co. in Detmold, probably around 1949/50. That company was founded in 1947 and the printing was done by Drückerei Gebr. Klingenberg from Detmold. In November 1950 the company was merged into the ASS. |
