In my years of collecting I have always had a passion to find new decks of cards,
new types of playing cards,
which have bizarre qualities to them, and these are just a few of them.
The obvious thing to start with, was to
find cards of different sizes,
and here we have got small and big cards.
The standard card is this size, but look at this tiny little deck here.
If I fan the cards out, you can see their values.
I think is a German deck because they use D for Damen, instead of Q for Queen.
They are very well made. The next size up, which is still a lot smaller than ordinary cards,
are these ones here. Children can cope with these very well
because they have small hands.
And then there is a big jump up to these seriously large cards.
You really need both hands to hold these cards!
Goodness, what a monster! Tremendous fun.
Another feature of cards is different shapes.
One of the first examples I came across is called a crooked deck.
Each card has a zig zag shape along the side.
So a crooked deck - something for crooked dealers maybe!
Anyway, a nice idea for a card.
A more subtle one is this example, where the card is slightly rounded at the top and bottom.
Turn it around, and you can see it has been printed to look like a can of beer.
About 20 years ago, a British company came up with the idea of triangular cards.
They said that the cards were easy to hold, and easy to read,
although I have never been too sure of that.
But I like the idea of triangular cards - very quirky.
Then a square deck. These look wrong somehow, since we are used to cards being rectangular.
But they work perfectly well.
Here is a wonderful idea, a round deck of cards!
Each one is like a coaster.
But they have all the design features of a normal card.
And it does not matter which way you hold them, they are always upright.
The last and probably the most bizarre of the different shaped cards are these -
this Japanese deck of cards is made to look like the skittles
from tenpin bowling. Very strange indeed.
They do not have faces on the court cards,
they just show the values.
So when you hold up a hand of cards, you can see the values very clearly.
What a strange idea.
So there we have 2 genres of playing cards,
cards of different size, and cards of different shapes.
And these are just some examples from my collection.
Wonderful things, playing cards. And I am always finding new examples at trade fairs.
Part my playing card collection has decks which show
cultural matters or cartoons or the like.
This one for instance is produced by the tourist Board in Israel
and it is called a Bible deck.
And while the low values are just normal cards,
when you reach the court cards, here we have got Absalom,
a fine picture of a biblical character; the Queen of Sheba;
and the king is King Solomon.
And all the court cards show well known biblical charcters.
Another deck features African people.
This is called the Black Pack.
All the low cards have a normal design,
but when we reach the court cards, we have a
fine African man as the Jack,
an African Queen, and a King. And all the court cards show African faces.
Many years ago an artistic friend of mine had a lovely idea for a deck of cards...
there are pictures of animals that children would enjoy. There are two butterflies,
and three beetles, and four dragonflies and so on.
It's a nice idea, and I like the Ace which has shows Noah's Ark.
So it is a deck where children can enjoy the pictures, while playing a game of cards.
This is a more serious cartoon deck;
where each suit shows a different story.
This one show a kind of 'Rake's Progress'.
Here is a a man turning up at the marriage agency to find a wife...
there they are as a couple...
and now they are being married with the priest as the third person...
and they start a family...
she's got twins, lucky woman...
and then there's more children appearing...
and it gets a bit out of hand for him, but she's got dreams of having more and more children...
and he is getting a bit dizzy from all this...
he takes to drink, that is the Jack...
the Queen, that is his wife waiting to hit him with a rolling pin...
and RIP (Rest In Peace) at the end...
and each suit has a different story, created by a different artist.
This is a deck which Disney Corporation produced in which the court cards are Disney characters...
there is Donald [Duck], there is Minnie, and Mickey of course.
This is most difficult pack of cards I have ever come across.
52 artists were commissioned to create just one card each.
This one is clearly the Ace of Spades.
But some of them are very obscure.
This one seems to be the Three of Spades,
but many of the cards are almost impossible to understand
unless you keep them in the original sequence.
The original artists were given a completely free hand...
what is that card, for example? It is heart, but which one it is I have no idea.
Imagine trying to play a game of Snap with these cards.
It would be very hard, since often you would not know the value of the card you were playing!
A nice idea, but very obscure as every card is done by a different artist.
So almost impossible to play with, but an interesting deck, with lots of nice images.
So, that is just a few of the artistic and cultural decks of cards from my collection.
Cards which show optical tricks or magic
are a favourite part of my collection of playing cards.
These are some of the optical illusion playing cards I have come across.
This deck has a nice optical illusion on the back of the cards,
where you seem to see a little dot wherever four squares meet.
On the other side there is a whole sequence of illusions.
There is the ambiguous vase...
the endless staircase... and so on.
That is a nice one... is it a duck or is it a rabbit?
Here is another deck with an optical illusion on the back
and a series of really nice optical illusions on the other side.
But you can use them as normal playing cards... you can see that one is the Queen of Clubs.
Here is an impossible object on the back of this deck of cards..
On the front of these cards are some really nice full colour optical illusions,
and some of these illusions I have never seen anywhere else.
So that was a very good reason for adding this deck to my collection!
A little while ago I came across an amazing set of optical illusion cards;
these cards were bought in the 1980s, they come from Paris,
and they have anamorphic designs on them.
Each of the cards has a distorted picture,
and when you place the reflective cylinder exactly on the picture of the sun
then the seven of hearts appears in view. Wonderful.
This card is the King of Diamonds - R stands for Roi which means king in French,
and the last one I will show is the Valet, or Jack, of Spades.
I think that is a beautiful idea, of having anamorphic playing cards.
So, optical illusions are always nice, but this is something really special.
In my mind, I always connect these optical illusion cards to magic cards.
There are hundreds of magic cards out there,
and I have so many in my collection I cannot begin to show all of them.
A typical magician's trick for instance
is to force a card on you, and when you turn it over you find you have got...
the three and a half of clubs... oh dear!
Or maybe the thirteen of clubs,
or the fifteen of diamonds, or some nonsense like that!
It is quite fun when you get caught out like that.
Another deck which I have had a lot of fun with is this one.
It is a perfectly normal looking deck, looking at the backs of the cards.
But turn them over, and it switches from a blue deck to a red deck.
These cards just have backs and no fronts.
Both sides are printed to look like the back of a card. You can do a lot of tricks with these.
A most remarkable magic deck is this one.
I can fan the deck and they look like ordinary cards,
But if you turn the deck over, I think it goes this way,
then when you fan out the cards it looks as if they have all become blank.
And then the climax, which is wonderful to do if I could pracice enough,
you get a real big surprise,
because a monstrous great dragon appears as you fan the cards. Wonderful idea.
And there is a nice pattern on the back of the cards as well.
I have had this demonstrated to me by a good magician and it really is spectacular.
Each card has a card value printed in one corner,
another corner is blank, and then there is a part of the dragon as well.
Wonderful stuff. So magic and optical illusions...
there are a lot of cards like this out there, and I just love finding them.
Here are three very curious decks of cards, with some strange characteristics.
This one, for instance, is a very old deck, which has three games in one.
You have got a set of dominoes in the middle there,
you have got a spelling game at the top,
and you have the playing card value printed at the bottom of the card.
So with these three possibilities, you really get value for money with this deck!
This deck of cards has got things for small children to do.
Some of the cards are normal, but sometimes you come across a card which says
act like a dog, or jump like a kangaroo.
So if they are playing a game with these cards
and they get a card with an instruction on it
they have to stop playing the game for a minute, and do what it says on the card.
This is an extraordinary deck of cards,
because there are very subtle and deliberate mistakes on each card.
Some of the mistakes are not at all obvious.
Now that is an obvious one, since if it is a heart it should be red...
and this one here has lost the bottom part of the design of the spade, so it looks like a heart!
And this one is nice - it has hearts at the corners, but a diamond in the middle of the card.
So although you can use these as normal playing cards,
every single card has an interesting and sometimes quite subtle mistake,
and it can sometimes be quite difficult to spot some of the mistakes.
So it is quite a test of your observational skills.
And lastly I have got few miscellaneous items.
This deck is called 'Queen's Slipper'. Apparently it is an Australian game.
It initially looks like a normal deck
but when you get to the 10, you find that there is also an 11 and a 12.
Then there is a normal Jack, Queen and King.
And every suit has these two extra cards,
which means there are 15 cards in each suit.
I do not know what the game is,
but apparently it is popular in Australia.
If you are playing cards where some people are blind and some can see,
here is a Braille deck, which is a nice idea.
They look like normal cards
but in the corners here they have the little bumps that can be felt
and allow blind people to know the value of the card they are holding.
The little bumps are quite subtle, so you cannot 'read' them by seeing the back of the cards
you have to feel them in order to know what the card is.
So, a deck of cards which can be used by sighted people and by blind people.
Here is an extraordinary idea for a deck of cards.
Every card is split, and shows two different values.
So you could have a game of bridge, in which you decide if you are going to use the values
on the white side of the card, or the yellow side.
I think there are a number of games that can be played with these cards.
The backs of the cards are regular,
but on the front of each card are two completely different values.
There are quite a number of people who are producing transparent cards.
It looks as though you will be able to see the value through the card,
But of course you cannot see through where the value of the card is printed.
Here is a wacky idea -
this is called Indiscretion Deck, where the idea is that the
suit of the card is visible; these are all clubs for instance,
and these cards will all be diamonds, these are hearts,
and those are all spades. On the faces, they are just regular cards.
It means that if you are learning to play Bridge for example
you don't need to count the trumps.
You can actually see how many cards of each suit people are holding in their hands.
There are a number of strange games which you can play with this deck of cards
which are unique to the design of this particular card. The Indiscretion Deck.
Finally there is always one that gets away from me and my collection,
and this is one deck that I regret not having. In 1993, 20 years ago,
a company in the USA produced the 'Jill' deck.
The idea was that you if you want a balance of genders in a deck,
you have the King and Queen, that is one male and one female,
but the Jack is male, so where is the female?
So they produced this deck with 14 cards in each suit;
it goes 7,8,9,10, Jack, Jill, Queen, King.
What a lovely idea. But... it got away. I never managed to buy one.