A Helium Poet Lenormand is the result of a forecast for bad weather that never happened. In 2013 I was on vacation with my best friend, Witta Kiessling Jensen, an artist and wife of legendary card collector and historian K. Frank Jensen. We had plans to swim in the North Sea all day long for several days. ‘Fat chance,’ the weather program said, ‘rain all week.’ A Helium Poet Lenormand came to our rescue.

All in one sitting, as that is my preferred mode for creating a deck of cards. Look at the first letters in this string... We didn’t get very far with our creative powers, as we got to soak in salt water quite a bit. The weather was a smash the whole of 4 days we were together, so there was no need for us to sit and sulk and turn our frustrations into art. But we did get started. We made a few cards. ‘How is this Whip?’ Witta asked me. ‘Perfect,’ I said. I had a couple of cards done on my own, and that was that. Witta left and I was left with the project unfinished.

I don’t like unfinished projects. On a rainy day while on another vacation in Norway, I finished the task in one hour. No edits. All the decks I’ve ever created followed this personal process: one sitting, one stroke, no edits. I offered the deck as a limited edition to the ones interested.

Then, when I started writing on the Lenormand cards for the third volume in the cartomancy trilogy under the signature of Read Like the Devil, I had the bright idea to use A Helium Poet Lenormand in a modified version to fit the need for my book. I replaced my hand drawn insets, and used instead the playing cards featured in Volume II, dedicated to reading playing cards.

The second edition accompanies the book Read Like the Devil: The Essential Course in Reading the Lenormand Oracle (June 2021), and is available from Make Playing Cards.

This is a utilitarian deck, whose insets by Goodall and Sons also appear in the second volume of the trilogy dedicated to reading with playing cards.