Blazing Heart Cards

A faithful replica of the famous “Old Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards” first published in Chicago in the late 1920s. Part of a vibrant American folk tradition that flourished in the early to mid 1900s, the cards were published by United Novelty Co of Chicago, and sold by Valmor Products (among others), also based in Chicago.

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The deck features 36 illustrated cards, with meanings printed on each card in a conversational style, including several cards that only appear in this deck. Many of the meanings show a warm and freethinking view of life and love that is unusual in a deck of this vintage, making it the perfect deck for readings about romantic relationships or advice on life’s many choices.

The deck originally came with an instruction sheet in both Polish and English. A copy of that original instruction sheet can be downloaded here.

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This was a very influential, or maybe I should say, much copied, deck. Copyright doesn’t seem to have worried anyone, and we see both the pictures and the meanings in card decks created by a number of different companies in the 1930s and 1940s.

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It has long been believed that Valmor commissioned the cards, and that they were most likely illustrated by Charles Dawson, one of the leading black artists and designers of the 1920s and 30s. Dawson worked at Valmor starting around 1928, and designed and illustrated their labels and advertisements during those early years. His work is distinctive, and the cards look like other illustrations he is known to have created. However, there is some doubt; Valmor didn’t own United Novelty, and there is no record of Valmor commissioning these, or any, cards. Most of Valmor's fortune-telling products seem to have been manufactured by other companies.

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Research into card history, especially fortune telling card history, is notoriously difficult, very little documentation exists. John Choma provided this information about United Novelty, given weight to the idea that this was the company responsible for this deck:

The United Novelty Manufacturing Company’s founder, William Valentine Janicki (1892-1964), was Polish. He had emigrated to the United States in 1906 and became a naturalized citizen in 1914. At the turn of the century, Janicki's hometown of Poznań was in the part of Poland that was controlled by the German Empire, which might explain the deck's multilingual English/German/Polish instructions. By contrast, the founders of the Valmor Products Company, Morton G. Neumann and Rose J. Neumann, were both born in the United States, and were of Hungarian Jewish and Russian Jewish descent, respectively.