A
WADDINGTON
SURPRISE
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Internet has changed the world and of course our hobby world isn’t an exception. Our fortune was that we had only just begun with seriously collecting playing cards, when the internet started to blossom and auction sites appeared everywhere. So we witnessed the changes: from being dependent of only a few collectors meetings each year or mail auctions by fellow collectors to see all kinds of interesting decks, a growing and seemingly everlasting stream of decks started to show up at Ebay and other auction sites. It turned out to be a great education in cards too. The most amazing decks have passed on screen ever since and even if we couldn’t afford them, the pictures were etched in our minds and the very special decks stored on the hard disk.
We found our first deck on Ebay and when we first saw it there, the court cards didn’t look familiar to us in any way. After receipt of the deck we took out the excellent books about the Waddington Collection by John Berry and started turning pages and looking at all the pictures. But nor in the text nor in the pictures we could find any reference to this clearly non-standard deck. In the printing process of that deck the calibration of the colors wasn't done properly, which didn't do justice to the designs. The deck has the back design as here below, but with the name of the shipping company in yellow (see next page). Here we show the courts from our second deck, which present the designs as they were intended to be.
The deck was obviously produced by Waddington, as the Ace of Spades carries the company’s name. By the time that John Waddington Ltd entered into the playing card manufacturing business (1922/23), they had already acquired premises in Leeds and London. As there was no reference in the Waddington books, we researched the company that had commissioned the deck, the Scandinavian-American Line from Copenhagen, in order to put a rough date to this deck.