An Apollinaire/Dufy Tarock

We've mentioned previously our Timon Schroeter Emblematic Cards reissue, as well as the Year 2000 Tarock. Another traditional Tarock deck uses Animals, often illustrations of Aesop's Fables. We recently made a new translation of Apollinaire's Bestiary, and when cleaning up the images, it occurred to us that they would make a splendid set of Atouts.

And they did:

We hand-coloured them to serve better as playing cards, and we added Orpheus as the wild card in play. Here are a couple close-up, showing more detail:

By way of explanation, the great poet Apollinare had convinced Dufy to make a set of wood carvings in the tradition of the old illustrated Bestiaries, to which he would write the text. The artist's book that was the outcome is universally acknowledged to be one of the great 20th century texts. We couldn't fit the poetry on the cards, but here are some examples for these cards:

Mouse

O lovely days, you mice of time,

Bit-by-bit my life you’ve chewed.

Lord! Twenty-eight I’ll be, my prime,

And lived it poorly, nothing rued.

Dolphin 

O Dolphins, you play in the ocean,

But the tide is a bittersome potion.

Sometimes, will my joy break out?

Life remains cruel, there’s no doubt.

Medusa 

Medusas, with unlucky heads

Of trailing violaceaous threads

You always find tempests delightful,

That they please me too is insightful.

The cards themselves have courts derived from old woodblock sets, so as to match the Dufy:

Here is the full set of non-Atout cards:

If you want to play Tarock with one of the great pieces of iconography, you can do so by purchasing a pack printed on demand at Make Playing Cards here.

If you want to know more about our Bestiary edition, you can get a copy printed on demand at Lulu, here.