Roy N.U. Mae

While I had fun at the Brimfield Antique Shows the other week, the rain meant that the ephemera vendors stayed closed.

But a few days later in a local antique shop, I did happen upon this full set of fortune telling cigarette cards from the 1920s! (Except for the instructions, of which I found a scan here.)

“Black Cat” was this particular cigarette brand, by the Carreras Cigarette Factory. It became the first cigarette brand in the United Kingdom to include coupons on collectible cards to exchange for stuff (think of Green Stamps or Kool-Aid points).

The coupons were integrated into collectible card sets -- the example above of a secretary bird ("Kodak at the Zoo") has an offer for a camera in exchange for 200 cards.

The subject matter for these cards ranged all over the place. A lot of times, you'll find tiny etchings or watercolors of birds, dogs, constellations, etc. I even have a polar exploration set. Over time, the coupon part got dropped, but the cards remained. Lots of brands got in on the act.

These particular cards are a copy of the "Dondorf's Lenormand cards" (above). They went through a few revisions -- the set I got is when the cards replaced the inset playing card with a portrait of a fortune archetype.

An ex-libris, also called bookplate, is a kind of printed stamp at the beginning or end of a book that says who owns it (think of the stamp you surely have seen in the books owned by a library). Though ex-libris have been used since ancient times, their "golden age" in Catalonia was during the Modernist movement (the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau), where many bookworm people commissioned artists to have a beautiful personal ex-libris that they could use to stamp all their collection.

The text in the 1st one, written in the Catalan language, says "no matter how much you know, there's always much more that you don't know" (per molt que sapies es molt mes lo que ignores).