Vintage "Old Gypsy Fortune Cards": Anyone have any info?

Aster Breo

My wonderful husband gave me a vintage deck for Christmas, and I thought I'd share and see if any of you know anything about this deck.

It's titled "Old Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards", published by Whitman, copyright 1936, 1937. The box contains 2 identical decks of 32 cards each and an instruction booklet titled "Learn to Read the Future with Old Gypsy Fortune Cards".

Each deck is broken into 4 suits of 8 cards: red (actually, more orange) hearts, black acorns, red/orange diamonds, and black circles. But each card in the deck shows a different symbol, rather than each suit containing the same set of numbered and face cards.

Since there are 2 decks, I thought it might have been intended as a game with 2 players. But the booklet has nothing about any kind of game play. It describes a very specific method of laying out the cards, lists meanings of all the symbols, and gives an example reading.

The art work is very 1930s and includes some symbols that would be in extremely poor taste and insensitive today. Over all, a very interesting deck.

Does anyone know anything about it?

 

Belinda2

I do have this deck and many other old fortune telling decks ( these were the first kind of decks I was attracted too but I have not looked at them in quite a while and frankly I am in as much in the dark as you are about to other uses for it, sorry I could not be more of a help.
 

Aster Breo

I guess I'm working on a collection of vintage decks. Very slowly, though. ;-)

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