The Gypsy Witch Cards

By 1903 the fortune-telling pack invented in Germany had crossed the Atlantic and gone thoroughly American. The Gypsy Witch cards take the old emblem system, the rider, the clover, the ship, the house that the Lenormand packs had carried for half a century, extend its thirty-six pictures to fifty-two, and print a miniature playing card in the corner of each so the deck doubles for games. Every card explains itself in a printed paragraph, distance-reading rules included, so no book and no teacher were needed: cartomancy as a mass-market product, sold for pennies and named for Mlle Lenormand, the famous Paris card reader who had been dead for sixty years and had nothing to do with it.

The fifty-two emblems keep the Dondorf-era core and add American conveniences: a railroad, a money safe, a park, broken glass, wine. The lady and the gentleman stand in as significators exactly as in the German packs, and the meanings still turn on proximity, a coffin far away is a mild cold, a coffin beside your card is not.

This copy earned its keep. A former owner penciled working notes across the faces, birch, sign-post, church, coffin, scythe, fox, snake, shorthand from real readings, and the cards are worn round at the corners. The deck has never gone out of print; the version sold today is nearly unchanged. These scans, made at high resolution from a surviving early pack, were released openly by the collector Darren Nemeth.