Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Musical Jokers and some Dogs

The top two jokers are a simple line drawing of a jester with a trumpet.  It's from a very beautiful custom deck created by Wayne, a Baltimore music teacher. The other cards in the deck are illustrated with images of different instruments and have encoded in musical notation the number of the cards.  It's an interesting idea.  He sells them under the name Nana-Pie.

The bottom two jokers are of man's best friend and the art exxagerates the difference in perspective when you look at dogs' noses from different angles.  The deck is copyright artist International  and is called: The DOB Artist Collection.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Jesters and their Baubles







Jesters and their baubles.  Baubles? Yes, I believe that the name for a jester's wand on which there is a little model of the jester's head is a bauble.  Here is a page from my joker collection with nine jokers. Each jokers features a jester holding a stick or wand with a small head on it. I believe that these are called baubles and are a common tool for court fools or jesters.

Jesters' Wands are called Baubles
Jesters' Wands are called Baubles


And I'll quote Wikipedia:

A bauble was originally a stick with a weight attached, used in weighing a child's toy, but especially the mock symbol of office carried by a court jester. This fool's bauble was a baton terminating in a figure of Folly with cap and bells, and sometimes having a bladder fastened to the other end. Subsequently it became a term for anything trivial or childishly folly.More recently the term means a virtually worthless decorative object.


Here are two pairs of jokers.  Like so many decks, there are two jokers; one in black and white, the other in color.
The two top jokers have nice artwork of jesters holding cards and leaning on a ball. The back of the deck says  Beaver Creek in Colorado.  I fear that the scan of these jokers is a little fuzzy.

The lower two have two jesters decorated with the four suits (clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades) holding their baubles.  

Friday, July 1, 2011

Each of these four playing card jokers are quite different. The shoe one on the top left is from a new shoe deck. The back (see the joker playing card back below) is an array of women's shoes.  The joker carries the message that:

A Child's first steps are taken in sensible shoes that can become cherished momentoes when bronzed.

Frankly, that's a weird one to me. First of all, my kids all took their first steps barefoot. Secondly, does anyone really bronze old baby shoes? Who and why?

What can I say about the others?

The Mars M&M marketing people have had a really great few decades. Once they realized that melting in your mouth, not in your hands was not the be-all and end-all of marketing, they have personified the little M&Ms in a vast number of ways.  From the recent edgy commercials where the grumpy M&M is staring at a little pretzel that apparently is going to be stuck up inside him, to  four foot stand-up M&Ms in the supermarkets, they've been saturating us with their brand and their energetic broad diversifications into rice-based M&Ms, peanut butter M&Ms, mint M&Ms, almond-centered M&Ms, and even the pretzel-filled M&Ms. The M&M playing cards were bought at an M&M store just off Times Square in NYC in 2009.

Not much to say about the Mexican-themed joker or the spooky lady other than I really like them!



Thursday, June 30, 2011

Inlaid Joker Boxes

I bought the little one of these boxes (the faded one)  in southern Spain in Dec 1987.

I acquired the second one on the Amalfi Coast in Italy in 2011.

Both are inlaid boxes. For those who don't know what the means: It means the artwork is done by laying in small "tiles" or pieces of wood to form the designs. It's not painted in, it's "laid in", hence the term inlaid.

I keeps jokers in them that need to be added to the collection. Its the second place place for them after they've been in my wallet for a few weeks.

To know more about this collection of jokers and the artifacts related to jokers that I have, I'd recommend the joker collections About Me page which covers masks, joker boxes, and why I don't collect clown stuff.




Moving beyond the boxes, want to see more jokers? Here's some article about different types of jokers: