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We bought this deck from a Belgian collector during the 2012 IPCS Convention in Issy-les-Moulineaux. He couldn't tell us anything about the deck, but there was a piece of paper with it, on which the title was typed (by him?) as "Erotic Art from The East". The dimensions were given as 55 x 87 mm, but the deck is crudely cut and not all cards have exactly the same size. There were question marks behind Printer and China and the year was given as 19....
Personally I would add India as possibility too, even though the figures, especially the ladies, have a more Chinese or Japanese look. The satin shining finishing reminds me of some Indian decks that I've seen. The printer was probably a small printing firm, as the cards are cut in an irregular way and the used card is rather thick.

It's a deck with some interesting features. At first look one would think that the deck was hand-painted, but a closer look reveals a fine offset printing. At first look one would think that the deck consists of a repeating series of 26 designs. But, although it's close, the designs were done twice, as there are small difference all around. Probably by the same artist, as the style and technique are very consistent. Still, it's intriguing why one would do that. If you have to draw 54 cards anyway, why not all different ones. The only reason I could think of, is that the artist copied antique (Chinese or Japanese) prints and that there were not 54 different ones available.

Usually we present the cards differently, but here we've put the suits next to each other, so you can play......
FIND THE DIFFERENCES
Usually we show the cards at 70%, but to make it a bit easier for you, we show the cards here at actual size.

An other interesting feature are the soft diagonal lines across the images, sometimes almost invisible, sometimes quite visible, as on the Ace of Hearts here below. At the first look they were puzzling me, but once I had seen the back of the cards, it became clear that they were not printing errors, but had been painted there intentionally. Why? Scroll down to the jokers for the answer.


CLICK ONE OF THE ACES ABOVE and BELOW to see the pips, compared per two suits.

The faint lines were put there to create an illusion. The deck is printed on sturdy card, the kind that one cannot see through. But in this deck the suggestion is made that we can. We've taken the jokers as an example for this, but each of the backs has that same method of design. It suggests looking through the simple back design, as the front image is shown mirrored and in soft black tones. And those soft lines on the front are there to suggest the same, but then the other way around. Was it meant to be a wondrous imitation of a translucent deck? The intention isn't clear, but it's apparent that the illusion is created. Comparing the mirrored image on the back with that on the front one an spot the differences easily, which means that all these mirrored images on the backs were created separately too. So a lot of artistic work was put into creating this deck, much more than we would have expected at first sight.

The deck consists of 52 cards and 2 jokers. It came in a -not original- plastic box.