Beschreibung:

Title: Four Works Popularizing Chinese Fortune Telling in America Author: Place: Publisher: Date: 1936-1948 Description: 4 items: Margarete Ward. Gong Hee Fot Choy / Your Fortune Los Angeles, 1936. First Edition. Original textured boards, with paste-on front cover illustration “by Chinese artist YIM”. 8½x10 inches, 68pp. Inscribed by Ward on copyright page. Another copy, “A Fortune-Telling Game…which uses Playing Cards / With Lessons from a Chinese Matchmarker in Numerology and Astrology.” Los Angeles, undated. Original wrappers in printed cover envelope with cardboard “Houses” chart which unfolds to 16x18 inches. “New Revised Thirty-First Edition”. 80pp. Another copy. Reno, Nevada, undated. “New Revised Forty-Eighth Edition”. 80pp., with apparently identical text.. Gong Hee Fot Choy Dream Book with Prophecy, Numerology and Planetary Hour Guide [and] excerpts from my book prophecy (Panorama City, undated, ca. 1948) 4½x7 inches, 68pp. A decade after the Mah Jong craze, Ward’s books became a wildly popular introduction to Americans of “Chinese fortune telling”. Little is know about the author, who claimed to have lived in Shanghai from 1919 to 1925, where she met “my teacher Lee Ming”. In 1938, she also published, “Born to the Purple, the Karma of Princess Minerva” an “exciting novel of reincarnation” with scenes from China and India. Whatever her qualifications, there is no doubt that Ward introduced millions of Americans to some of the “mysteries” of ancient China. Nearly 80 years after its first publication, her Fortune-telling and Dream books are still in print. Lot Amendments Condition: Mostly light general wear; very good. Item number: 249813