The Kipper Cards

The Kipper cards appeared in Bavaria toward the end of the nineteenth century, a fortune-telling pack of thirty-six numbered scenes whose name nobody has securely explained; the favorite story points to a Munich fortune teller, but no record of her survives. Where the Lenormand reads through emblems, a dog, a tower, a bouquet, the Kipper reads through people. Its first two cards are simply the main man and the main woman, and around them stand a false person, a rich girl, a marriage, a small room, a court house, a bit of money. It is household drama dealt out card by card, and the reading style that grew around it leans on direction and distance: who faces whom, and how far apart the trouble sits.

The pack has never gone out of print in Germany, but the early printings have never been opened to the web. The one institutional trace online is a fragment of nine cards from a printing made decades later.