I didn't write the text of the English Lenormand book - I simply found it when doing a search on the British Museum archive page. I wrote a blog post and let everyone know of its existence. At the time only the cards were online. Marcus and Tali made a trip to the BM and copied the pages which they printed up as a booklet, and very nicely gave me part of the credit for it. In the meantime, the BM photographed the book and made all the pages available.
You can now read the whole book and see all the cards here:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/resear...1&assetid=1175525&objectid=3283055#more-views
It is from 1796, and the cards are called "coffee-cards". It is claimed in that book that they were first seen in Vienna and that this is a translation. While there are morals written on each card, the text makes it clear that the coffee-ground meanings (standard for the 18th century and found with nearly identical wording through the 20th century) are depicted by the cards. The instruction sheet that came with the original 1846 Lenormand deck gives almost the identical meanings for the cards. The main change is that the top and bottom of the cup becomes the near and far Lenormand meanings, and that "clouded" coffee-ground emblems are sometimes described in Lenormand as "with Clouds" (interpreted to mean with any negative card but especially Clouds).
This seems to me to be pretty positive proof that a near ancestor of the Lenormand cards was absolutely coffee-ground divination connected. This doesn't mean that there weren't other sources or influences, too.
Note: there are only 32 Coffee-Cards (or Viennese Emblematic Fortune Telling Cards) of which 2 aren't found in Lenormand, so if this is the deck that was adapted by Hecktel in 1799 and made into the Game of Hope, then he added several images (called emblems or hieroglyphs), modified a couple and put the playing cards on each.
