April 2007
There were 2 interesting events this month. First the largest collectors fair in the Netherlands: the 3-days Jaarbeurs in Utrecht. Although it started on Friday the 13th, that day turned out to be a very good one for our collection. At the end of the day we had found a good number of decks and none was younger than 75 years. The next event was the Dutch collectors meeting in Nieuwerbrug. Always nice to see the fellow collectors in person again. Makes discussing cards much easier. Of course we picked up a good number of decks there too. Ebay brought us some interesting decks too and all this together made it a very difficult choice this month. At the end it was down to 3 decks: an indexed version of the Children's deck by Müller from Switzerland, that we got through Ebay, a very nicely designed French deck (the joker is this month's Joker of the Month) that we bought in Nieuwerbrug and the deck below. This one came from the Jaarbeurs.............
The deck was made by Friedrich Adolf Lattmann from Goslar, Germany, ca. 1880, maybe a bit earlier. It is printed in lithography and was stencil colored. This "No 9" deck consists of 40 cards (K,Q,J, A, 2,3,4,5,6 and 7 in each suit) and was used for playing "hombre".
The courts show the company's version of the Frankfort pattern. The company logo, the initials of the maker, is on the Jack of Hearts and the model number "No.9" is on the Jack of Clubs.
The Lattmann No. 9 decks often come with plain aces, but this deck was probably made for export to the Netherlands and has aces with scenes and buildings from Dutch towns and cities.
What made this deck especially attractive for us was the fact that on the Ace of Spades the Dutch town of Zaandam is depicted. Nowadays this town is the main town in a conglomerate of several other towns, known as Zaanstad. One of these smaller towns is Zaandijk, where we have lived for the last 25 years now and hope to do so for another 25. All together a good enough reason to make this the first "Deck of the Month".
