The Fortune Cup
From Mystic Tea Room
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- Patreon Release Date: December 21st, 2022.
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In keeping with the Winter theme of warm tea and tea-leaf reading, this week's offering is a genuine rarity, the Snowhite Regency Fortune Cup containing 52 playing cards and made by the Johnson Brothers Pottery of England for an extremely elusive couple named Verna A. and John W. Meredith, who copyrighted the cup in the U.S.A. and promptly disappeared. Cartomancy tea cups are not common, but this cup is so hard to find that in all my years of collecting, i have only seen it put up for sale twice, once in 2011 without a saucer, and once in 2017 as a complete cup and saucer set. The Johnson Brothers pottery was among the world's largest manufacturers of table ware, but they never made another divination cup during the entire run of the company, from 1882 to 2015. These images will eventually be on display at the Mystic Tea Room web site. As a Patreon supporter, you have access to them one full year before the public does.
To place this work in context, please read the following introductory pages
The Fortune Cup
The Fortune Cup is the somewhat generic name given to a rare cartomancy cup and saucer set created by Verna A. Meredith and John W. Meredith, which bears a copyright date of 1965. It was manufactured in England for the Merediths by the large Johnson Brothers pottery on their popular 1960 Snowhite Regncy swirl shape, with gilded rims, and was probably decorated in one of the company's plants in North America. It has all 52 playing cards on the inside and is signed by the designers as "Verna A. and John W. Meredith."
I have not found any newspaper or magazine advertisements for The Fortune Cup by this design team, but they were definitely American, not British, because in 1965 they took out an American copyright on "The Fortune Cup" name and a drawing, which was subtitled "Cross of Playing Cards." The copyright notice reads as follows:
- MEREDITH, JOHN W.
- The fortune cup. See MEREDITH, VERNA A.
- MEREDITH, VERNA A.
- The fortune cup. [Cross of playing cards] Drawing. © Verna A. & John W. Meredith; 12 May 65; GU3863O.
The content of the copyrighted "Cross of Playing Cards Drawing" is unknown to me, but one guess is that the drawing depicts a card layout of some kind. There are quite a few "Cross" layouts used by fortune tellers, from the Celtic Cross to the Cross of Fifteen, but without the picture itself, it is impossible to know what was intended, or how this drawing relates to the actual tea set shown here, beyond the obvious fact that they were both released the same year.
The rarity of the Meredith Fortune Cup comes about because it was not a regular issuance from the [:Category:Johnson Brothers|Johnson Brothers]] pottery and was not marketed by them. Instead -- like the Zancigs Cup of Destiny, made by the Anchor Pottery; Genevieve Wimsatt's Chinese Fortune-Telling Teacup, made by the Canonsburg Pottery; and the Creative Art Products Romany Cup of Fortune, made by Cavitt-Shaw -- this was a custom job, designed by, and delivered to, a small home-based business, in this case, Verna A. and John W. Meredith. Who they were and where they lived is still a mystery, but if more information comes to light, you'll see it here.
DIV-TLR-FOME
catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
The Mystic Tea Room
