Oh, dear, dear, no...
I've talked about the faces of the jokers, but what about the backs? Well, they come in four main types: advertisements; souvenirs, pictorial and plain.
The plain ones are still quite ornate, of course, but they don't depict anything in particular. The pictorial ones do (often in pairs from a two-pack set), but it's not of a commercial nature — it's just meant to be attractive in some way. The souvenirs are for places and events, and are commercial in the sense that they want you to buy them not because they're cards but because they're associated with something you want to remember. The advertisements are just that: cards that advertise something — they're often given away for free on that basis.
Rather than show you all the examples I have of these, I'm just going to comment on the ones I find most interesting. You'll be pleased to know that there are none of these for souvenirs or plain, and I'm only going to pick five for advertisements. Here they are:
The first one is pink; I have another that's blue. You'd probably be had for paedophilia if you made cards like that these days.
The second one is a maroon tanker (eBay has also listed blue ones) from Butterfields of Shipley (whoever they are). I suspect the picture is a lot older than the card, but I could be wrong (see next card).
The middle one is an advert for Oldham car batteries. Again, eBay has had individual ones of these for sale in blue. The "Lively O" advertising campaign ran from 1930 to 1933, so these are probably older than they look. Not all the jokers in this collection are post-war.
The fourth one is a promotional card for Al Koran, a mindreader from the days when you didn't risk death from calling yourself after a holy book. I wonder if the card is marked?
I included the last card as an example of how not to do advertisements on cards. You really don't want to be looking at that while you're playing, Relyon. It might work for a street poster campaign, but for cards, eyukk! This one is manufactured by Universal, by the way (the rest shown are Waddingtons); Universal must have been less inclined to offer their customers advice...
There you go. That wasn't too painless, was it?
Oh, and I found out the manufacturer of the second-left from the bottom that I blogged about here: Dondorf, which is actually one of my favourite manufacturers so I'm quite pleased.