So after yesterday, when we featured the enemy of the native red squirrel, today we have one of their favourite things - and that is nuts. In fact it is estimated that just one squirrel hides about three thousand nuts every winter season. This is known as "caching" and you can forget the idea that a squirrel buries these nuts and cannot find them again - though it does occur with younger squirrels before their skill is fully honed, and sadly, with elderly squirrels, who just cannot remember. Indeed recent research has actually started to discover that as they age, squirrels can develop the same signs in their brains as human patients with Alzheimer`s, and there are studies ongoing to find out of each species can benefit the other. However a healthy adult squirrel definitely remembers where he hid his nuts extraordinarily well. And not all of them bury them hither and yon, some have a kind of larder, a special place, not too far from where they hope to hole up for the winter. The others seem to prefer the idea that it is safer to split their hoard several ways, so that if one is found others lay close by.
I am always glad when I tie a loose end, and we featured "the other" version of this set in our newsletter for the 15th of March 2025 - though you will need to scroll down to Friday the 21st of March. That set was of six cards whilst ours is double that length, with twelve, and, even odder, both sets were issued in the very same time, between 1872 and 1873. However, although they follow on in the Fada and Sanguinetti catalogues, almost no collectors believe it to have been one set of eighteen, they all think that it was two, our set of twelve, rather muted in its hues, and then a more brightly coloured set of six.
As for our set, it comprises :
- two figures pulling a third along on a spoon
- three figures fencing with crab sticks whilst a fourth holds the rest
- one figure riding a bottle of drink atop a lobster cart, two trying to push the cart
- one figure being shot into the sky by means of a cork ejected
- four figures trying to crack an oyster
- three figures, one tightrope walking along a knife rest
- four figures hold napkin ring whilst one figure leaps through
- two figures ride each end of a melon whist one poses in front with cherry earrings
- a procession led by a figure with a spoon, followed by four with a silver container and a chicken?
- three figures trying to break a nut with nutcrackers
- three figures trying to put out a fire in a bowl (note the firemen`s helmets)
- four figures trying to put air in a pie with bellows
There must have been more than one printing of these, because you can get all the cards with large "Compagnie Liebig" and "Capital Neuf Millions Verses" printed on the front, and other cards without this - though the same "Neuf Millions" is still mentioned on the text on the back. There is a theory though, that being that when the cards were first printed, without the information on the front, it was deemed to be hiding the light beneath the bushel, as it were and so they were simply overprinted again, just the fronts, to add this information.