Hello everyone. I'm not a collector and I know about cards nothing. I just need help with a deck identification. Could you name country of origin, manufacturer and year of issue if possible? Thank you!
Sorry for the long delay in replying.
It's going to be nearly impossible to determine who made this deck and when, not unless you get very lucky. They were somewhat common in the 1950s and 1960s, printed by many smaller companies which likely no longer exist. "Artist model" decks featuring photography of nude women in simple, basic, arguably non-sexual poses as if for a painting or sculpture were made as a way to sell soft-core pornography (nudity without the depiction of sexual acts) while at the same time trying to avoid being classified as pornography, aiming instead to be considered "artistic." Community standards of the time would have make decks like this the kind of thing that would be sold under the counter or in an adult bookstore, and because of the stigma (not to mention possible criminal and civil liability) that can come with such an association, many producers and manufacturers of these decks left their names off of decks like this.
The back design looks vaguely like the "banknote" style backs that were used in the Aristocrat and Blue Ribbon deck brands from Russell, which eventually became a USPC subsidiary - which itself is now a subsidiary of Cartamundi (reminds me of Russian nesting dolls)! But I'd say it's probably not from them - more likely an imitation or a knockoff trying to look like a higher-quality product than it actually is, something that wasn't uncommon with cheaply-made decks like these, especially when printed without any manufacturer's attributions anywhere on the cards and possibly the packaging as well. Do you still have the box? Even if it isn't completely intact, it may be useful in identifying the maker and country of origin, possibly even the approximate manufacture date.
Your best bet would be to hunt it down the old-fashioned way at "World Web Playing Cards," over at
http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/ - they have a very extensive database of designs, including items along these lines. You'll have to do a LOT of looking around, opening up image files for a number of different decks - it's going to be pretty time-consuming, but on the plus side, I don't think that they have a huge number of nude model decks on file. You can try narrowing the search at first to just American-made decks - the "guarantee" wording is a little similar to the type that was commonly used by USPC at the time. There's also a chance that the deck was actually made in China, even if for an American producer, though I imagine importing nude images back then was fraught with risks - I have no idea what the Customs regs were 60 or 70 years ago, but I imagine stuff like this would have been restricted in some manner.
Another possibility would be to seek out people who collect nude decks - there's a fair number of collectors who specialized in this category. The only issue there would be that decks of this nature were printed in smaller numbers and generally more likely to wind up destroyed, trashed, etc. than ordinary playing cards would be - a bachelor gets a girlfriend, fiancee or wife who doesn't approve of porn, a mom finds them in the pants pocket of her son, teacher catches kids with them in the school yard, etc. - so there would be fewer surviving examples than other contemporary decks of the same era.
