Hello everyone !
Here are the scan of two other favourite decks of my collection.
The first deck is a 4-11-44 gold edges (Hochman L17) with a nice grey and white 4-11-44 back and a beautiful engraved Ace of Spades but without joker and box. On the back, we can see crows and if you look carefully their posture, you can distinguish the number 4-11-44 : Four with the first crow, Eleven with the latter two and Forty Four with the last two.
We can also see a crescent moon on the back. This symbol was also used in other decks, for example the Joker of the Crescent #44 (Hochman NU11) and the Joker of the Tip-Top #350 (Hochman PU1).
The second deck is an Extra 4-11-44 (Hochman L22a) with gold edges too. The back has an attractive brown color and represents a black man sitting on a rocking chair, under a crescent moon again and beside a spider web. There is a banner of playing cards in the middle of the card and when starting at the middle to either end, we can see : four of diamonds, six of heart + five of diamonds and four of spades + four of clubs. This correponds to the sequence of numbers Four Eleven Forty Four, in addition to the 4-11-44 logo, also added on this back (and captured in the spider web to maybe remind the "sticky" superstition concerning this fetish number).
The particularity of this copy is the joker and the ace of spades : The Ace saying "Globe Playing Card Co, New York and Chicago" but the joker saying "Card Fabrique Co, Factory Middletown".
I asked the question to an expert to identify better the deck in the Hochman and apparently, "it is not surprising that the deck would be issued with the Card Fabrique Ace and the Globe joker or the Globe Ace and the Card Fabrique Joker because both companies were owned by the same family and made their cards in the same factory. Other than the names the aces and jokers are the same."
About the 4-11-44 game, here is a part of the story for those who don't know :
"Four Eleven Forty Four or 4-11-44 is a phrase that has appeared repeatedly in popular music and as a reference to numbers allegedly chosen commonly by poor African Americans while gambling.
The roots of the phrase can be traced to the illegal lottery known as "policy" in 19th-century America. Numbers were drawn on a wheel of fortune, ranging from 1 to 78. A three-number entry was known as a "gig" and a bet on 4, 11, 44 was popular by the time of the Civil War.
The New York Clipper,a sporting and theatrical weekly, ran a serial story by John Cooper Vail in April and May of 1862 titled "'4-11-44!' or The Lottery of Life in the Great City," indicating that the number was already a gambling cliche. The Secrets of the Great City, an 1869 book by Edward Winslow Martin, references 4-11-44 and attributes the section on policy to "the New York correspondent of a provincial journal", but does not name the writer. Nor does he date the article, except to say it was published "recently".
The combination became known as the "washerwoman's gig" after it featured on the cover of Aunt Sally's Policy Players' Dream Book, published by H.J. Wehman of New York sometime in the 1880s. The stereotypical player of the washerwoman's gig was a poor black male."
